


Fullmetal Riverdale

by lnles



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alchemy, Alternate Universe, Child Soldiers, Evil Parents, Multi, Nonsense, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, War, Weirdness, these teens have seen things no mortal should
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-04
Updated: 2019-10-25
Packaged: 2019-11-07 19:18:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 77,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17966459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lnles/pseuds/lnles
Summary: After a terrible wartime alchemical accident, Jughead Jones finds himself on a mission to restore his sister Jellybean's body, who suffers as a disembodied soul in a mechanical prison. Luckily, Jughead can rely on the help of ace detective Betty Cooper, who has returned from war with a few scars and bad memories of her own. Meanwhile, Veronica Lodge goes toe-to-toe with her parents, Riverdale's iron-fisted rulers, and tries to resist their totalitarian regime, even as her boyfriend, Archie Andrews, embraces it. And in the ranks of the South Side Serpents Toni Topaz finds herself caught between old loyalties and rising dissent, as the gang splinters in the face of a government crackdown, and Toni struggles to hold onto her girlfriend, Cheryl Blossom, in the chaos. What's going on in Riverdale? How does it all fit together? Why is this town a circle? And who is the mysterious Gargoyle King, pulling all the strings behind the scenes? Tune in and find out!





	1. Why Is This Town A Circle?

**Author's Note:**

> Trust me. I can't be more unhinged than the people who actually write this show, can I?
> 
> EDIT: I can be pretty flip about this show and how weird and wacky it is, but in all seriousness I'd like to dedicate this chapter of this weird thing to Luke Perry, who always brought a genuine warmth and loving dadliness to his role on Riverdale. RIP, sir. You were a very special part of a very special show.

At sixteen years old, Jughead Jones was well known as the youngest person in Riverdale’s history to master the art of alchemy without a transmutation circle (actually, his sister Jellybean was the youngest, but for various reasons she preferred to stay out of the spotlight). Jughead’s first free transmutation was nothing special in the grand scheme of things: tired of the hospital, tired of waiting for a recovery he knew would never come, Jughead clapped his hands together, wincing at the unfamiliar weight of the new prosthetic on his right, and pressed both hands, one flesh, one metal, to the locked door. He imagined what it would be like to push through this barrier to freedom, and immediately found out. Blue sparks leapt from his fingertips and across the surface of the door, splitting it down the middle, the metal rolling back onto itself like curtains. Jughead stepped through the gap, still unsteady on his new prosthetic left leg, and looked both ways down the hall, wondering which would lead him to Jellybean. He had a very pressing apology to make.

Now, months later, Jughead was much steadier on his new leg and quicker with his new arm, both automail, forged by Jellybean just for him. He was a sort of minor celebrity, much to his displeasure, everyone in town interested in seeing alchemy done without a circle. But if it weren't for avoiding the curious eyes of his fellow townspeople, Jughead's days would have been fairly empty. No one went to school anymore, since they’d closed up the South Side Academy and cancelled classes most days on the North Side because of the electricity rationing. There was really only one reason Jughead spoke to anyone but Jellybean now: almost every evening, including this one, he could go to the offices of the Blue & Gold Brief, the North Side school newspaper, where he was sure to find Betty Cooper, his closest friend and intrepid companion in tackling every sordid mystery and macabre murder that floated to the surface of Riverdale society like scum in pond.

Betty and Jughead stood together examining a large black and white map of Riverdale pinned to the Blue & Gold’s bulletin board. Several sites on the map were circled in crimson marker, lending them an appropriately blood-stained look. They were all locations which stood out painfully in Riverdale’s already deeply scarred town memory.

“It doesn’t make sense, Betty,” said Jughead. “Why would Fuhrer Lodge and her husband buy up so many derelict properties on the South Side?”

Betty nodded, brows knit in her signature mystery-solving face. “She hasn’t only invested in South Side properties, Jug. Look.” Betty pointed to the upper half of the map. It was true: the Fuhrer had also bought several properties in the more upscale half of Riverdale, dotted across the North Side like a broken string of pearls, centering on Pop’s Diner, double-rimmed in red, to indicate its dual identity as a Lodge property and the site of the tragic murder of Colonel Fred Andrews, the universally beloved father of Betty and Jughead’s erstwhile friend/aide-de-camp to the Fuhrer, Archie Andrews.

“On the North Side, she bought businesses like Pop’s, reliable moneymakers. That makes sense. The First Husband is a businessman. But these South Side properties are all dilapidated, falling apart, empty! What could the Lodges want them for?” said Jughead, pacing a small circuit in front of the map, and steadfastly ignoring Betty’s smile as she watched him walk out his quandaries.

“They must have some kind of bigger plan, Jug,” said Betty. “They aren’t buying these places at random. There has to be a pattern.” Betty singled out three South Side properties: Sunnyside Trailer Park, Twilight Drive-In, and Pickens Park. “They’re all around the edges of town. Like...a circle or something.”

Jughead frowned. “What else do they have in common otherwise, though? Nothing with the North Side properties, that’s for sure. Pickens Park is Riverdale’s own miniature Wounded Knee. Twilight Drive-In was shut down after a series of mysterious disappearances of Hitchcockian proportions. Sunnyside Trailer Park is like a scene out of Trainspotting. These sites have nothing in common except a history of violence and depravity.”

Betty looked at Jughead, eyes wide. “But that’s it, Jug! Colonel Andrews was murdered at Pop’s. And we both know what happened at Sweetwater.” They both fell silent for a moment, until Betty worked herself back up to speaking. In a slightly softer voice, she went on. “All of these properties are tainted by Riverdale’s horrifying history. The Lodges are collecting them for some reason. Look at how they’re all around the town.”

“Exactly like you said, Betty,” said Jughead, voice tense with a dawning realization, “They’re in a circle around town. Like a transmutation circle.”

“A town-sized transmutation circle? Why would you transmute all of Riverdale?”

“And what would you transmute it into?”

“We have to investigate.” Betty shot him a small smile. “That is what we do here, isn’t it? At least until the Red Circle shuts us down for sedition.”

Jughead couldn’t help but smile back. “And until then inquiring minds deserve to know. Where do we start?”

Betty grabbed her red marker and a ruler from her desk, and connected the circled sites. Joined together with clear, straight lines, they certainly looked like a transmutation circle, though not one Jughead recognized. It was hexagonal, each point a recent acquisition of the Lodges’. But there was a gap in the circle. It was unbalanced along one side. Connecting the last two points, Pop’s and the Drive-In, would leave the circle uneven, incapable of performing any kind of alchemy at all. There was still one point missing.

Betty capped her marker with a pop, satisfied with what she had produced. “So there it is. Definitely a transmutation circle.”

“But missing a point. The Fuhrer still needs one more property to complete her plan.”

“I think I know which one, too.” Betty reopened her marker and circled one last location: the derelict shell of South Side Military Academy.

“Hmm…” Jughead pondered the possibility. “I remember going to school there, before Sweetwater. The South Side Serpents...”

Betty let her mind drift. Jughead could go on about the South Side Serpents for hours. A radical anti-government resistance group founded by Jughead’s father, FP Jones, the Serpents were Jughead’s pride and joy for all of the six months he’d led them at South Side Academy, until the draft came down and all teens in Riverdale were sent to the Sweetwater front. Betty was ashamed to admit she thought of those six lonely months as worse than anything at Sweetwater.

Not long after Jughead’s dad transferred him to South Side Academy to lead the teen Serpents, Betty and Archie fought for the first time ever. Betty still felt a stab of betrayal when she thought of Archie, the way he’d fought her first investigation of the Lodges. When she wouldn’t back down, he'd pulled away, unknowingly pulling all the rest of her friends with him. Veronica, Kevin, even Cheryl, Betty saw less and less of them after the fight, their social lives suddenly full of state-mandated together time which somehow always excluded her, as if the Lodges themselves were using all their power just to cut her out of cheap high school rallies and dances. Betty didn’t like to think of that lonely time. She didn’t like to think of the time just after it either, the days in the Sweetwater trenches. She liked to think about whatever the latest mystery was, and how she would solve it.

So Betty contemplated the Fuhrer’s acquisition of all these strange and haunted properties instead.

On the one hand, the Fuhrer was an incredibly wealthy and powerful woman, since the First Husband had made a fortune in real estate before Fuhrer Lodge’s “election”. Why shouldn’t Hiram and Hermione continue the Lodge business in the free time they found by delegating most of the legwork of politics to their trusty intern Archie?

But on the other hand, this pattern of purchases was particularly suspicious. Why buy a ring of properties around Riverdale? Come to think of it, why buy properties in a ring which would entrap Riverdale like a wall? Why was Riverdale itself a circle? And what would this possible transmutation circle create?

Betty wasn’t sure. And Jughead didn’t recognize the circle either. He might be a little long-winded sometimes, but he was the best alchemist in their class, and that kind of talent didn’t lie. So if the Fuhrer had some kind of nefarious plan for Riverdale, some heinous intentions, they would have to investigate further. This case had the potential to be bigger than the Case of the Black Hood Killer, or the Case of the Sugar Man, or even the Case of Clifford Blossom. It would be dangerous. It would be disturbing. It would likely even be deadly and destructive, like each of their previous cases.

Betty couldn’t wait.

“Jug, let’s go. We can’t find out anything else here. We need to visit the South Side Academy.” Betty yanked on Jughead’s arm, bringing his Serpentine soliloquy to an abrupt end.

“Now? We haven’t had dinner yet,” said Jughead, looking pained.

“We’ll stop at Pop’s on the way,” Betty replied, going to the small safe beneath her desk, and spinning the dial through its combination. With a faint click, the safe opened, and Betty withdrew her pistol in its holster. She slid out the magazine. It was full. Last week was a quiet one.

Betty clipped the holster to her belt, and looked up to see Jughead watching her, eyebrows raised. “Do you really think we’ll need that?” he asked.

“Jug, we don’t know what’s waiting for us down there. Could be a Red Circle installation, waiting to haul us out in front of a firing squad for treasonous trespassing. Could an incursion from Greendale.” Betty gestured to Jughead’s hands, resting comfortably in the pockets of his jeans. “Not all of us have magic powers, or a Swiss Army Knife literally on hand.”

Jughead reached up and yanked his beanie down over his eyes, only his scowl visible below its hem. “I don’t want to look at the person who made that pun,” he said. Betty waited, head cocked slightly, until he slid his beanie back into place and looked into her eyes, clearly trying to suppress a smile. “I’d also like to add that that’s a gross exaggeration of what automail can do. I do not have a screwdriver, a toothpick, a file, or anything else that useful in my hand.”

“Didn’t you transmute your pointer finger into a can-opener once?” said Betty, grabbing her sweater and slipping it on, yanking the sleeves when they bunched at her elbows.

“Yes,” said Jughead, as he took a pencil from the desk and put it behind his ear. “So if we’re confronted by a giant killer can of beans, I’m ready for it.” Betty noticed that Jughead didn’t bring any paper to accompany the pencil jauntily cocked above his left ear. She felt a small swell of affection for the sweet, harmless vanity that kept Jughead constantly trying to invent himself as a writer, an alchemist, an investigator. She suspected he would be a lot of things in his life, but not many of them for very long.

As they stepped to the door, Jughead offered her his left arm. Betty laughed. “A formal escort? I had no idea this was a special occasion.”

Jughead reddened, and spoke in a rush. “I thought we’d look a little less suspicious. Tonight is the night of the latest premiere at the Bijou, and you know that means everyone’s got a date night on their minds.”

“Oh, of course. What's an investigation without an undercover assignment?” said Betty, taking his arm and letting her hand rest gently on his wrist. As they passed out of the office, Betty reached up with her free hand and flicked off the lights.

Strolling across town, past all the cheerful couples Jughead had predicted, Betty noticed an unfamiliar warmth in her chest. It was nice to walk this way with him, to tighten her hold on his arm whenever she needed him to listen or wanted to point the way, and know she still possessed a firm link to the world, besides her awful mother.

Betty remembered in eighth grade Archie asked her on a “date”, and they went together to Pop’s and the Bijou and then the park. They sat on a bench and looked at the spring foliage, and Betty strained and willed for Archie to kiss her, to make her feel special the way she thought he was special. Instead Archie told her what a swell girl she was, and asked if she knew what kind of flowers Veronica liked. Betty went home that night and cried as soon as she was sure she was out of her mother’s hearing range.

This wasn’t like that date at all, or any of the few others she’d been on. Betty felt no strain, no stretch of desperation and dissatisfaction. However this turned out (and she hoped it would turn out with a solved mystery and a reward to add to her Riverdale Escape fund), she was glad to spend this time with Jughead exactly as it was, and when she looked over to him, and saw the soft way his face relaxed, the quiet of his expression, Betty felt certain he was thinking the same thing.

Pop’s was busy, but not crowded, and there was no wait for a booth. They slid in opposite each other, and Betty suddenly found she was scared to look Jughead right in the face. She pulled a package of Splenda from the tableside dispenser, and spun it absently on the formica tabletop, until it picked up too much momentum and careened across the table. Jughead caught the pink packet and held it out to her.

Betty took it, and finally met his eyes. “Are we still undercover?”

“We’ve gotta be. You know they’re always watching,” said Jughead, putting on an exaggerated face of suspicion, eyes darting left to right. “The truth is out there and all that.”

Betty laughed. “What do you think is waiting for us at South Side Academy then?” she asked. “Flukeman?”

“As far as I can tell, just about everything that’s happened to us has been a fluke, so I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said, nodding as she rolled her eyes at the pun. “I’m sorry, but you know you deserve it after that Swiss Army Knife crack.”

“If I apologize, will you accept victory and cease this assault?” she asked, suspecting she already knew the answer.

“After only one volley?” said Jughead, resting his chin on his left hand and drumming the table with his right, the sound echoing strangely up into his hollow metal fingertips. Betty listened to the sound carefully. She could hear the weight in each impact.

“Is your arm very heavy?” she asked, and seeing his eyebrows knit in confusion, she backtracked. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to change the subject. It’s just that I can hear the weight,” she said, gesturing to his right hand.

Jughead nodded. “It is heavy. The leg is heavier, but it’s a little better balanced,” he said, spreading his right hand, palm up, on the table for her to see. Betty stared down into the complexity of interlocking gears and pistons that let his fingers flex and curl as freely as those on his flesh hand.

“Jellybean’s work is amazing. She has a great vision for systems,” said Betty. “There’s nothing in a car that compares to this.”

“She’s the best,” said Jughead. “Without her automail, I’d have half the speed and flexibility I do now. I owe her everything.”

Betty reached out to touch the knuckle of Jughead’s index finger, and then hesitated. “It’s not polite to touch without asking, is it?” she asked.

“Are you asking if you can touch it?” Jughead replied, a laugh implied but suppressed in his tone.

Betty felt her neck and cheeks get hot. She bit her lip, wishing she hadn’t wandered into this line of conversation. “I’m sorry if that’s intrusive. The engineering is really fascinating, and as much as I ask Jellybean to tell me about it, it’s not the same as getting a look at it,” she said, hand still hovering above Jughead’s, still a bit too close to be casual.

“Go ahead,” said Jughead. “I don’t think Jellybean would mind you learning more about automail. She might be willing to take on an apprentice.”

“An apprentice?” said Betty absent-mindedly, running her fingers across the joint of Jughead’s finger, feeling where the metal was wearing thin from use, where the joint was slick with lubricant.

“Two there are always, a master and an apprentice,” Jughead said, voice strangled in a way that made Betty flick her eyes up to confirm he wasn’t choking.

“Oh, is that supposed to be Yoda?” she asked, going back to her examination, growing bolder now, flipping his hand over to examine the back, where the fingers fit into the hand, where the many separate mechanisms wove into one.

Jughead sighed. “I’ve been practicing too.”

“You’re no Frank Oz, Jug,” Betty replied, pulling back from Jughead and sitting up straight as the waitress set their food before them. It was a testament to both Pop’s memory and the frequency with which they visited his restaurant that Pop no longer felt the need to ask Betty and Jughead what they wanted. It was always the same, consistent and comforting: Jughead got the classic burger and fries, the fries even pre-striped with ketchup, and Betty got the Breakfast #3, two fried eggs, two strips of bacon, and a thick thatch of hashbrowns. She’d once asked for fruit instead of hashbrowns during one of her mother’s diet kicks, and Pop had come to her table to ask her if she was feeling alright.

Betty smiled down at her plate. If she ever left Riverdale, she would miss this. She looked across the table at Jughead, whose burger already sported an impressive bite mark, good enough for forensics in all likelihood, Betty thought. Jughead had a look of bliss on his face that could only be summoned by a good meal, and Betty tried with all her might to fix that expression in her mind’s eye exactly as it was in that moment.

They ate quickly, everything at Pop’s being better while it was hot, and it was only after their empty plates were gone that Betty spoke again. “Do you ever think you’ll give up the automail? Go back to lighter prosthetics?”

“I don’t know. Automail’s better for all the action we see. And I can’t give that up.” As he said this, he almost smiled at her, but something else passed across his face that snatched the light away. “At least not until I get Jellybean’s body back.”

Betty reached for his hand again, but not to examine it. “It wasn’t your fault what happened to her, Jug. Alchemical accidents happen all the time. It's lucky that RD R&D was already working on soul alchemy.”

“Still,” said Jughead, closing his cold metallic fingers around the warm living ones she’d rested on his palm. “I know JB wouldn’t have tried anything crazy if it weren’t my idea. I wish I could remember what actually happened. I don’t even know where to start to get her body back. But I can’t let her stay the way she is. She can’t feel anything, she can’t be a kid the way she is. And if anything happens to her soul’s seal, she’ll die.”

“She hasn’t died yet,” said Betty, wondering if he would feel her squeeze his hand. “She’s still living, even if it’s not exactly like the rest of us. That means there’s still time to figure this out.” Betty made herself sound more hopeful than she felt.

Jellybean had come very far from the average eleven year old. Her soul trapped in a two meter tall combat mecha, Jellybean now possessed the durability of a tank, driven by the willfulness of a traumatized child. Betty still wasn’t sure what had happened to Jughead and Jellybean to rend them both apart so thoroughly. The siblings were told it was an alchemical accident, a transmutation gone wrong, and that Jellybean was saved by the quick thinking of the research physicians at Riverdale General, already experimenting with the transmigration of souls. Jughead found this story fishy, his memories a gaping hole when it came to the incident, and Betty could find no clear information in her investigations, nothing that could explain the impossible state of the Jones siblings. Few enough took Jughead’s conspiracy theories seriously. As the joke went in veterans’ circles, who hadn’t come back from the Sweetwater war in pieces?

Jughead released Betty’s hand and slid to the edge of the booth, looking back to her as he stood. “We’ve got a lot on our plate to figure out then. Ready to go?”

Betty nodded, and stood, pulling her wallet from a back pocket. “I’ve got fifteen, I think. Feel like owing me?”

Jughead bowed his head deferentially. “I already owe you just about everything. What’s fifteen more?”

Betty shot him a mock glare as she handed the bills to the cashier at the counter. “Is that an excuse to avoid paying me back?” she asked.

“Oh, perish the thought,” Jughead replied, already making for the door, his gait a little faster than normal, as if he were trying to get out of range of her disapproval. “Just a gesture to all that you’ve done for me. Someday you’ll wake up to a shower of bills and gifts, just as soon as I figure out how to monetize my occupation as town freak.”

Betty caught up to him at the door, change in hand, and let him go before her as she shoved the coins into her wallet. “You’re not willing to monetize your occupation as town freak, you mean. People offer you money for transmutation every day.” She stepped through the door Jughead held open for her, and offered him her arm. “We’re still undercover, aren’t we?”

Jughead linked his arm with hers, and gestured to the two pedestrians on the sidewalk. “Until we beat the crowds, I think it’s absolutely necessary.” They kept up their joint stroll until they arrived at the boarded-up shell of South Side Military Academy. Betty unclipped her flashlight from her belt, and flicked it on, scanning the dilapidated edifice before them.

South Side Military Academy, though a functioning school only a year before, had seen a rapid and painful decline. Most of the windows had been smashed by unhappy students avenging their transfer to the North Side’s school, and now all the windows on the upper floors gaped emptily like toothless mouths. The windows on the ground floor, however, were boarded up with sheets of plywood, and heavy padlocks held the doors shut. Thick, creamy shafts of moonlight poured through the empty upper floors and across the grounds, to settle silently at Betty and Jughead’s feet.

They stared up at the sprawling ominous wreck, and then Betty gave Jughead an expectant look.

“You’ve got an idea about how to get in here, right? Because I lent Archie my bolt cutters two years ago and he never gave them back,” she said, leading the way up the walk to a set of double doors chained shut.

Jughead smiled. “This is nothing compared to breaking out of Riverdale General.” Jughead clapped his hands together and then pressed them to the shackle of the massive padlock. Bright blue shocks of light passed from his hands into the shackle, which folded in on itself until the padlock slipped free of the chain and fell to the ground. Jughead stepped back, grinning at his handiwork.

Betty rolled her eyes, yanking the heavy chain free of the door handles. “Alright, nice magic trick, Houdini. Have you got any more in case we run into trouble inside?”

“That’s the beauty of transmutation without a circle, Betty,” said Jughead, gently pushing open one of the doors. Even with the lightest touch, the hinges howled, echoing into the yawning gloom of the empty halls. But Jughead stepped fearlessly into the dark, looking back at Betty with a smile. “Whatever comes our way, I’m ready for it.”

Betty bit the insides of her cheeks to keep from smiling back to him. Still, it was hard to resist. “Don’t get cocky, kid,” she said, following Jughead into the dark. “Anything could be in here. If we’re right, and this is the next property Fuhrer Lodge is going to snap up, something terrible has to have happened here.”

“Sure,” said Jughead, leaning around a corner to peer down the empty hall. “But where hasn’t something terrible happened in Riverdale? We’ve already found out your dad is a serial killer, Cheryl’s dad is a murdering drug dealer, and my English teacher was hooking kids on the Jingle-Jangle. We watched Colonel Andrews die on the floor of Pop’s. We went to war. How much worse could things get?” Jughead paused, waiting for Betty to respond, complain that he’d uttered the deadly phrase “how could things get worse?”, but Betty said nothing. He turned back to her, heart racing, and saw her, flashlight in hand, carefully examining the graffiti-stained wall. “Betty, are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Betty said, not looking away from the wall. “But take a look at this.” She waved him into the perimeter of the golden yellow illumination cast by her flashlight.

Jughead went to her side, following her gaze. In between the many iterations of “Ghoulies Rule!” spray-painted onto the once pristine school wall, a series of strange symbols were chalked onto the brick. There were three of them: one like an axe with a round blade slicing down to the right, one like a downward-pointing triangle with three dots along its upper side, and the last like a horned “V”, antlers curving up and in, ready to impale an unwary mind.

Jughead shivered.

“What are those, Jug? Are they alchemical symbols?” Betty asked, tracing the last one with a finger, and examining the white residue left on her fingers.

Jughead shook his head, wracking his brain for some memory of the strange runes. “No. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them before. They’re definitely not for alchemy. They’re so old. So...primal. Like something out of Clan of the Cave Bear or something.”

Betty stared at him, forehead wrinkled in disbelief, all mysteries momentarily forgotten. “Clan of the Cave Bear is basically porn, Jug.”

He shrugged. “Sure, but in between the porn they had a few interesting runes. I thought you’d like any book with a code in it, Miss Nancy Drew.” He paused, stroking his chin mock-thoughtfully. “Come to think of it, how would you know the books were mostly porn without having read them?”

Betty blushed, and looked away. “Last year was lonely, okay? Not much to do but read. Especially once they sent us out to the front at Sweetwater.”

Jughead winced. He’d been avoiding the topic of last year ever since he’d returned to North Side Military Academy and joined her at the Blue & Gold. Jughead, Betty, Archie, they had all been friends since kindergarten. But then Jughead’s dad had transferred him over to the South Side Academy so he could study with the Serpents, Archie had become Fuhrer Lodge’s intern, and lost what little life he’d had, and the rest of their friends...well, who knew what they did? Jughead knew Betty had been lonely, especially after her sister, Polly, skipped town. The first time he’d seen Betty for more than an hour or two since leaving the North Side was during the Sweetwater Engagement, and neither of them wanted to remember that. He missed her so much during those months, but life on the South Side was chaotic, every day a new gang fight or heinous prank or unfair detention. And meanwhile Betty was in the midst of finding out her dad was a demented serial killer. The few times she and Jughead did meet up, Betty was dead-eyed and exhausted, and Jughead wasn’t much better.

And then after Sweetwater, in the hospital together, Betty was everything, the only person he could really talk to, the only person who could cheer up Jellybean. Together they got the hospital administrator fired for corruption and gross incompetence. Just like old times.

Jughead was afraid to broach the subject of his year away with Betty. She must be angry with him for leaving. For not being there for her until after Sweetwater. Jughead felt the guilt like a barely scabbed over scrape, one he couldn’t bear to expose again. He and Betty were such a good team now, such good friends, such-

From somewhere far down the hall came a piercing scream. Betty and Jughead flinched together, reaching for each other in the same moment. Betty’s flashlight fell from her hand, and with a single ringing tone, the glass bulb shattered and the light went out. They clung to each other in the dark. Jughead could feel Betty’s pulse thudding in her wrist where he had grabbed her. Betty clung to him just as hard, but felt nothing. She had grabbed his prosthetic arm.

“What was that?” he whispered.

“I don’t know. It sounded-” She hesitated, fear squeezing her voice into silence. “It sounded like a person. A person screaming.”

“Yeah, screaming like they were in a school play of  _The Exorcist_. Where was it coming from, do you think?” sadid Jughead, peering into the pitch dark. Somehow the bright wash of moonlight which beckoned them into the building had disappeared just as they’d lost their only source of illumination.

Betty shook her head, and Jughead sensed the motion rather than seeing it, so dark was the hallway. “I don’t know, Jug. I can’t see anything. Even if we could figure out the direction it came from, how would we know which way to go?”

Again, an awful shriek came echoing out of the bowels of the building, driving into Betty and Jughead’s ears like nails. They winced, and Jughead released Betty’s wrist, feeling for her hand instead. His fingers closed over hers, still warm despite the unearthly chill settling over them both. He squeezed, hoping the gesture would reassure her. She squeezed back, then gasped, almost letting him go in her shock of realization.

“What is it? Are you okay?” he said, clinging to her hand all the tighter.

“Yes, and I think there might be a way for us to navigate, at least until you figure out how to transmute lockers into some kind of phosphorescent element. You were about to go around a corner before I called you back, right?” Betty asked, and again Jughead could sense her scanning the hallway left to right, as if hoping that a hard enough stare could penetrate the darkness.

“Right.”

“So if we keep one hand on the wall and keep moving forward, we’ll hit that corner. We came in at the south entrance, and that’s the first corner we’ve hit, so we’ve been heading north so far. The hall curves to the right up there, so then we’ll be heading east. As long as we remember how many times we turned, and always keep a hand on the wall, we’ll at least be able to find our way back. But if you could whip up some light soon, that would still be good.”

Jughead pressed his right hand to the wall with a soft metallic clank. He pulled back momentarily and flexed his fingers. “I think my finger bolts are getting loose again. They don’t feel right.”

Betty sighed. “Why don’t you take better care of your prosthetics? You know Jellybean will have a fit.”

“It’s not my fault! The metal doesn’t release alchemical energies the same way bodies do. The screws heat up and deform.”

“How about this: if we survive tonight, I’ll take a look. Maybe I can repair it before Jellybean has to see what you’ve done to all her work.” said Betty, pulling Jughead farther down the wall, her free hand also pressed to the bricks.

Jughead followed, his metals fingers pinging softly every time they bounced over a divot in the wall. “You think you can fix automail just because you know how to fix cars? I’m not Optimus Prime, humans and trucks don’t have a lot of overlap.”

Even in the pitch dark, Jughead swore he could feel the force of Betty’s glare on his skin. It was warm and oddly comforting.

“I’ll be able to figure it out, Jug. Jellybean started on cars too.”

“I know your skills are for real, Betty, don’t worry. I don’t want to end up with Herbie for a hand, though.”

The Herbie reference managed to draw a laugh from Betty, even as she felt carefully around the corner, hand running blindly over cold, empty lockers. As she stepped around the corner, something clattered under her feet, and she jumped back, pressing herself to Jughead. “What was that?”

“It wasn’t a scream, at least.” Hesitantly, Jughead moved past Betty, and bent down, feeling around where he thought her feet had been. His hand closed on something, and it produced the same hollow clatter. He picked it up, and, letting Betty go, felt the object with his flesh hand. “I think it’s an aluminum can.”

Betty groaned. “We sure make a real Scooby Duo, huh?”

Jughead shook his head. “No, this is a good thing. If we could just find some strontium, I could transmute this to glow in the dark. It’d give us a little light.”

“Where are we going to find strontium, in an old school building, in pitch darkness?” Betty asked, her tone suggesting that the logical answer to the question was “nowhere”.

“I have an idea, but we’re going to have to get lucky. When I went to school here, all the classrooms had old cathode ray televisions in them. We’ll have to hope we’re close to a classroom, and that all the TVs haven’t been lifted by Jangle Jockeys.”

“We’d better start looking then.” Betty found Jughead’s hand in the dark and pulled him forward, still following the wall with her free hand. They moved down the hall quickly, taking two more turns, even as another awful scream rang out from somewhere ahead of them. The empty school was becoming oddly humid and musty as they moved deeper into its bowels, and Jughead noticed a strange smell hanging thickly in the air. It smelled like the Jones family fridge after Jellybean left an open package of bologna in its deepest reaches for several months.

Neither Betty nor Jughead knew if they were touching lockers or doors when their hands passed over a seam in the wall, and they felt along in the dark for several minutes before Betty stopped in her quest, Jughead stumbling forward in the wake of her sudden deceleration.

“Jug, did the classroom doors have little glass windows on them? The bumpy, frosted glass?” she said, not moving her hand from what she felt.

“Yeah. Is that what you feel?”

“I think so.” Betty ran her hand down the door’s surface, tensing with satisfaction as she felt the smooth metal surface of a doorknob. She turned it, and with a barely audible click, the door swung open. The two of them stepped inside, keeping their hands to the wall, moving together to the right of the doorway.

“They usually kept the TV on a cart behind the teacher’s desk,” said Jughead. The classroom was drafty, cold, and thunderous with the sound of the plywood window covers juddering in the wind. As Jughead ran his hand along a shelf of what felt scarily like VHS tapes, he remembered the excruciating afternoons screening sex ed videos with Toni, Fangs, and Sweet Pea, his South Side friends, all of them putting their own spin on the infamous phrase “Now what is an erection, Mr. Andrews?” Jughead wished he’d never told them that the star of the videos was his erstwhile best friend from the North Side. He felt vaguely ill every time he watched Archie’s forced banter with Fuhrer Lodge and the health professionals of Riverdale. Jughead always wondered how Veronica felt about her boyfriend playing the whole town’s teen sex mascot. Lately he’d imagined she must feel very lonely.

“How are we going to find the teacher’s desk in this dark, let alone the TV cart?” said Betty, still feeling along the wall, and encountering only dusty posters, a long strip of paper that might be a timeline. She hoped it was state history from before Independence, not a Riverdale Information Bureau production. Even before the Lodges ascended to power, the government had never been generous with facts.

Jughead shrugged in response to her question. “We’ll have to make like Howie Day and collide.”

“Okay, that was your worst one yet,” said Betty, seconds before she stumbled back with a sharp crack of knee on wood and a yelp.

“Was that it?” Jughead asked, reaching forward, fingertips hitting a cold metal handle, the rim of a cart, and then- Yes. It was the hard plastic bulk of the CRT TV. “Stand back, Betty. I’m going to have to smash the screen to get at the tubes.”

He sensed Betty’s presence receding back toward the wall. “Be careful, Jug.”

Jughead felt around the TV’s case until he recognized the smooth coolness of glass. Turning his face and chest away from the screen, he delivered a crushing blow with his metal fist. The screen gave in with a brilliant song of shattering, the clatter of glass shards echoing through the classroom and out into the hall.

“Let’s hope whoever’s shrieking up the place thinks we’re more Jangle Jockeys,” said Jughead, reaching carefully inside to place the aluminum can in among the cathode ray tubes. Then he pressed his palms together, and shoved them both into the guts of the TV.

Betty watched the blue sparks of alchemical energy throw Jughead’s features into sharp relief. Along the opposite wall, the light cast a flickering shadow of Jughead which Betty had to admit looked quite imposing. In shadow his beanie appeared a real crown, and his South Side Serpents jacket billowed out behind him, giving him the silhouette of an imposing, heroic type. Betty wondered if this was how other people saw him, not as the snotty kid she’d known since kindergarten, but as Riverdale’s alchemical prodigy, and yet another newly minted veteran of Sweetwater. She liked it better when he was just her boy wizard, the two of them chasing down a mystery. Nothing outside the story they were composing together.

The transmutation only took a moment, and Betty filed her thoughts away for later as Jughead withdrew the can from within the depths of the television. It glowed a soft, delicate green, like the stars Betty’s parents pasted to her ceiling when she was a child. The can’s light was faint, but it provided just enough illumination to reveal the dire state of the classroom. Everything, from the desks to the posters, was covered in a fine greenish-grey dust, and roaches, beetles, and other bugs burrowed in and out of anything vaguely organic. The windows were covered with plywood sheets, but they were poorly attached, and billowed and buckled with every gust of wind.

Betty shivered. In the dark she’d concentrated so hard on finding her way that she managed to tune out the clicking, rasping symphony of bugs, and their plywood rhythm section. “Let’s go, Jug. The sooner we get to the bottom of this, the better.”

Betty and Jughead stepped out into the hall, light can held high, and immediately reeled backwards. The far side of the hall was lined with desiccated bodies. Most of them were human, or used to be, red-grey flesh stretched tight and dry over round skulls with gaping eye sockets.

“That explains the smell,” said Jughead, grimacing.

“What happened to them?” Betty said. She stepped forward, reaching out as if to touch one, and then shrank back, lips thin and chalk-white. She tried very hard not to throw up.

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like this. They look like the life got sucked right out of them,” Jughead said. “We didn’t study signs of a Dementor attack in school.”

“Jug, I really hope this is one of Fuhrer Lodge’s properties,” Betty said, stepping back to Jughead’s side.

“I feel like that’s the worst thing we could find out, isn’t it?” said Jughead, passing the glowing can close to the face of the nearest body, examining its rigid, withered features.

Betty laughed, but it was so sad and cynical that Jughead felt a twist in his heart like Betty had tied a knot there. “Jug, if this isn’t part of Fuhrer Lodge’s plan, then that means we’ve got another mass murderer loose in Riverdale. The fourth in two years, not even counting the drug dealers and ganglords.”

Jughead turned back to Betty and, without stopping to think, hugged her tightly, his metal arm resting heavily on her shoulders. He was gratified to feel her arms wrap around him just as tight, and for a moment there was no other sound but the gentle rush of their breathing, their chests rising and falling in turn, quick enough that a gap never opened between them.

“Whatever happens, Betty, we’re going to solve this case. And we’re going to bring whoever did this to justice,” said Jughead, letting go and pulling away to look her in the eyes. They shone bright in the green glow of the can light, and Jughead wished this moment could be happening anywhere but in the middle of a mass grave.

“I know. But how long before anyone’s even left in Riverdale? There’s more bodies in these halls than in Riverdale and Greendale combined. Where did they even come from? Who were they?” Betty said, her hand tight on Jughead’s arm. “Don’t you ever think of leaving Riverdale, Jug?”

Jughead slumped into himself, looking away, only to meet the empty black eye sockets of a corpse. “I can’t leave. Not until I get Jellybean’s body back. She lost everything, and yet she’s still taking care of me. I have to repay Jellybean, and Riverdale’s where her body was lost.”

Betty nodded and adjusted her ponytail in that familiar way she did when thinking tough things over. She gave Jughead’s arm a last squeeze. “Then let’s get to the bottom of all this as quick as we can, and ride off into the sunset. I’ve always wanted to go west.”

Jughead laughed, more at the thought of them really actually living under a warm western sun than at Betty's wish to be there. “West? I’ve heard it’s all A Boy And His Dog out there. The last guy who joined the Serpents said his family was from LA, and that every day’s another Black Dahlia in that city.”

Betty shrugged, taking the light can from him and holding it high out in front of her as she led the way farther down the hall. “It doesn’t have to be LA. I was thinking more like Seattle or Vancouver.”

“Oh no, not there!” Jughead said. “We’ve got enough Twin Peaks vibes here to last a lifetime. If we’re going anywhere, we’re going north over the border, somewhere safe and quiet, like Canada.”

Betty looked back at him with a small, ironic smile “Didn’t Archie get mauled by a bear in Canada?”

Jughead rolled his eyes. “It was a flesh wound. Barely that.” He laughed. “Remember how much Fuhrer Lodge and the First Husband complained when he was out of commission for that whole week he was in the hospital?”

Betty giggled too. “I think they missed him more than Veronica did.”

“Poor old Arch. I hope they pay him fair for everything they make him do.”

Betty leaned around the next corner, stepping carefully over the tangled limbs of the innumerable bodies still piled up in the hall, now so many as to cover the floor in places. “I’ve always wondered why Archie is so into being the Fuhrer’s intern. He won’t hear a word against them, but he couldn’t name another member of the government to save his life.”

“He’s no Tracey Flick, that’s for sure,” said Jughead, picking his way through the mass of undifferentiated, twisted corpses. “I think he’s just doing it for Veronica. Arch has always operated under the assumption that he and Veronica are going to grow up, get married, and Leave It To Beaver for the rest of their lives.”

Betty snorted. “Has he noticed all the murder going on left and right around here?”

“Knowing Arch,” said Jughead, “Probably not.”

Betty and Jughead stopped then, interrupted by yet another horrifying scream. It was very close and worse than ever, piercing them and pulling them towards the source of the sound like a harpoon. They ran forward, ignoring the crunch and crackle of the dry dead bodies beneath them, and came to a halt before a pair of double doors. White light spilled out from beneath the door, not quite reaching their toes. Another scream rang out from behind the door, so loud and so near that it seemed to rattle the door on its hinges. Betty and Jughead hesitated, each looking to the other.

“That’s the gym,” said Jughead. “Biggest room in the building. Whatever they’re doing in there, they need scale.”

“You ready, Jug?” said Betty as she slid the light can into her jacket pocket and flicked open the holster of her pistol.

“Ready as I’ll ever be, Betty. How about you, Miss Nancy Drew?” he said, hoping to draw a smile from her. He wasn’t disappointed.

“We’re about to solve another mystery. Let’s get to the bottom of this.”

And with that, Betty pushed open the doors and strode through, Jughead close behind her.

They were overwhelmed by the light as soon as they entered. The gym was lined with massive floodlights, all pointing inward at a huge transmutation circle, half the size of the basketball court. At the center of the circle was a pile of withered bodies just like those lining the halls, all pressed against a chest-high podium. Several of the bodies looked disturbingly fresh, steam curling off of them in light gray loops towards the ceiling, which hung heavy with pennants and shadows. The corpses’ faces could still be made out, not quite so rotten and shriveled as the older bodies outside. It was obvious they had died in agony. A quiet weeping echoed from the far side of the pillar, but the source of the sound was hidden behind the mass of dead.

“So there’s the reason for our screams,” said Jughead, scanning the edges of the room for any sign of danger.

Betty tugged on the edge of his jacket, pointing ahead of them, and Jughead realized the danger was confronting them directly. Now standing on either side of the pillar, having apparently coalesced from the ether, were two people, both smiling and too still, as if they were statues, an extremely recent artistic addition to the South Side Gym. The only things that gave the newcomers away were their eyes, which shifted from Betty to Jughead and back again in quick succession, sizing them up.

On the left of the pillar was a thin blond man, lean and sinewy, his hair wild and spiky, sharp as his cheekbones. Something in his face, maybe the hard way he sized them up, reminded Jughead of Betty’s mother, Alice Cooper. The blond man wore a thin white tank top and shorts, just as if they’d stumbled into his backyard during a mid-summer barbeque. He bore a strange mark on his left thigh, only partially visible under the hem of his shorts. The mark, a tattoo maybe, was maroon red, a circle with a six-pointed star inside. Jughead didn’t recognize it, and that bothered him.

On the right of the pillar was an older woman, red-haired and sleek, black gloves reaching up to her elbows. Her dress, long and black but embroidered with huge bloody red cabbage roses, was strapless, leaving a wide expanse of bright white chest and cleavage. Just above her breasts, the woman bore the same strange star in circle tattoo as the man. But strange tattoo or no, Jughead recognized her, and so did Betty.

“Penelope Blossom,” said Betty, glaring at her aunt. “I should have assumed a sadist like you would be involved in this torture session.”

Penelope laughed a horrible low laugh, the sound bubbling forth from somewhere deep in her gut. But she said nothing.

“Who’s your friend, Penelope?” said Jughead, sizing the other man up. He didn’t look much older than Betty and Jughead, maybe college-aged, and he was so skinny Jughead thought he couldn’t be much in a fight.

“Care to tell us what you’re up to in here?” Betty said, taking a step forward to the very edge of the transmutation circle, Jughead right alongside her.

“Other than murder, that is,” Jughead said, unable to look away from the silent screaming faces of the corpses around the podium. He noticed the faint but unmistakable smell of burnt meat in the air. “How could you do this to another human being?”

The man spoke, his voice oddly low and heavy for his small, thin frame. “There’s your mistake, Mr. Jones. Bold of you to assume we’re human at all.” And then the man charged, speeding at Jughead with all the force and velocity of a truck. Jughead barely had time to duck out of the way, and he spun on his heel to watch as the other man slammed into the bleachers with a great crash, shattering benches as if he weighed ten times what he looked.

Beside Jughead, Betty found herself in an equally dangerous face-off. Penelope Blossom raised her arm and her fingers stretched horribly long, into meters-long blades, all speeding forward to puncture Betty’s heart. Betty ducked with only seconds to spare, dropping to one knee and drawing her pistol, firing three slugs into Penelope’s chest. Penelope whipped backward, her spine bending at an inhuman angle, but just as quickly she was upright again, grinning at Betty as the gaping, bloodless holes in her chest smoothed over, Penelope’s skin and clothes knit back together by strange tile-like tendrils and the same electric blue sparks that haloed Jughead’s hands whenever he performed a transmutation.

Penelope slashed at Betty again with her long, glossy fingerblades, and Betty rolled to the side, pushing herself to her feet before she could catch a breath and forcing herself towards the bleachers and the hope of some cover.

Out of the gaping dust-shrouded hole in the other bank of bleachers, the thin man emerged, his heavy steps sending up a puff of debris with each footfall. Jughead crouched, ready to move but not sure where, not sure what he could do to counter that much force. The man grinned, just as demented as Penelope, and Jughead braced himself for a bone-crushing charge. He forced himself not to move, not even to flinch as his opponent came rushing towards him, and at the last possible moment Jughead pressed his hands together and slapped them against the ground. Blue lightning crackled along his fingers and into the gym floor, twisting and sparking across the floorboards, which arced up in the form of a massive spike, piercing the strange man through the gut, leaving him impaled and dangling several feet off the ground.

Jughead stood and warily approached the man’s still, dangling form. The wound was bloodless, more like a tear in a piece of paper than a horrific fleshly puncture. Already, the man’s skin was trying futilely to knot itself back together across the spike of transmuted floor. The edges of the wound puckered and tensed, and slowly, slowly, slowly, the man’s body inched up the spike as if it had a will of its own. Jughead watched, fascinated. Just as he’d claimed, there was no way this man was human, no matter how much he looked it. There were rumors of demons and cryptids running wild in Greendale, but since the Sweetwater Engagement the border had been closed and patrolled by the Fuhrer’s troops 24/7. Maybe-

Jughead never got to finish the thought. The man’s limp, dead arm suddenly snapped into life, bending at an alien angle. His fist swelled into a huge, hammer-like bulge, and slammed directly into Jughead’s chest. Jughead went flying, hitting the ground hard two or three meters away from where he’d been standing, and skidding another meter or two after.

“Jug!”

From across the room, dodging in and out of the bleachers, taking potshots at Penelope, Betty saw her friend hit the floor and not get up again. The monster-man was slipping languidly off the spike now, his arm retracting and deflating into something more in line with normal human dimensions. Distracted, Betty gave Penelope the opening she’d been waiting for.

Shifting to the left, Betty found herself pinned by a strange sickening icy presence within her right arm. It was more nauseating than painful, but nonetheless she dropped her pistol as fear flooded her brain. Betty looked down and saw three of Penelope’s fingerblades penetrating her arm, sliding all the way through and nailing her to the support beam of the bleachers. Betty twisted involuntarily, and then there really was pain. Penelope’s fingers were like razors, and Betty was certain that with each move she made her arm was being shredded from the inside out.

Across the room, the man approached Jughead’s prone form. He looked down at the unconscious teenager, his strange sharp face twisted by a sadistic grin. Penelope, following Betty’s terrified gaze, turned to watch the scene as well, extending one long finger on her other hand across the gym to tap the man on the back. He turned to Penelope, one eyebrow raised. “Don’t tell me you’re having an attack of conscience now?”

Penelope shook her head. “You know the King wants them alive, Chic. They’re two of the final sacrifices, off-limits to us.”

Despite the storm of pain rolling through her arm and into her brain, Betty noted the name: Chic. Somehow it sounded familiar.

Chic rolled his eyes at Penelope, and then turned back to Jughead, who was stirring. “I know what I’m doing.” With the tip of his shoe, Chic kicked back the hem of Jughead’s pants, first one leg, then the other. Betty wondered what he intended, and then realized, one awful second before it happened. Chic lifted his own leg as it swelled and distended just like his arm had, and brought it down heavily on Jughead’s automail leg, shattering it beyond repair. Jughead screamed and writhed. Automail tapped into the wearer’s nervous system. He felt it as deeply as if his flesh and bone leg were shattered.

Betty didn’t have long to worry about Jughead’s pain, though.

“Let’s go. Take care of Curdle. I’ll grab the stone,” said Chic, staring down at Jughead’s suffering, seeming seconds away from drooling in delight.

Penelope nodded, and curled her knuckles inward. Her fingers began shrinking to normal length, but not fast enough. They tore through Betty’s arm, shredding her muscle and spraying her in her own blood. Betty collapsed, unable even to scream. Penelope turned away, and with a flick of the extended finger on her other hand, slashed the throat of another man, someone Betty and Jughead hadn’t seen before. He was hunched at the far end of the gym, opposite where they’d entered, his leg manacled to a ring set in the gym floor a few feet away. He was sitting at the activation site of the transmutation circle, and Betty realized he’d been the one triggering the circle and killing all those people. It didn’t matter now. He was just as dead as the rest of them, his blood spilling out in a wide arc around him, obscuring the chalk outline that had separated him from his victims.

Chic went to the pillar at the center of the transmutation circle, and grabbed something from the top of it. As he lifted it, the object caught the light: it glowed crimson red, a bright round gemstone of some kind. Penelope gestured to Chic and they both moved to the door. Penelope hesitated then, hand over the knob. She looked back at Betty, who was still hunched beneath the bleachers, blood soaking her shredded sweater.

“You meddling kids had better get out of here. Now that the crest is carved and the stone is forged, this building doesn’t have long to stand. And the King will be very put out if he thinks Chic and I let you die. You’re part of the Core Four, after all.” And with that, Penelope and Chic disappeared into the dark, corpse-strewn hall.

Betty crawled out from under the bleachers, teeth gritted so hard aching lines of pain arced through her jaw. Every time she tried to put weight on her right arm, it gave out, but not before sending blinding waves of agony through her body. She inched along, thinking about what she would use as a tourniquet for her arm. She was losing a lot of blood, a thick trail of it marking her path towards Jughead. Maybe the leg of his pants. He didn’t need it for his automail leg anymore, that was for sure.

Betty reached him, and discovered things were even worse than they’d looked. Jughead was conscious, but he was white-faced and shaking, and his leg was completely destroyed. It looked like a toy that had been dropped from a great height. Betty slid to a halt beside her friend, and forced herself to stay upright, even as she listed from side to side, dizzy from pain and blood loss.

“Jug,” she said, managing little more than a whisper.

He looked up at her, eyes wide as he took in the damage to her arm. “Betty, your arm-”

“I’ll just have to learn to shoot left-handed,” Betty said, forcing a smile, though the only thing Jughead saw in her expression was the blood running over her gums from the tooth she’d gritted in half. Betty squeezed his arm with her good one, trying to draw his attention back to their more immediate concerns. “I need your pants leg for a tourniquet, Jug. Can you help me cut it off and tie it?”

Jughead nodded, and forced himself to sit up, though he almost fell backward, expecting the familiar counterweight of his left leg and finding its awful absence instead. He reached into his jacket pocket and found his Serpents switchblade, embossed with “FPJ” on the handle. Jughead flicked out the blade and, holding his empty pant leg taut, slashed it right below the hip, at the base of his short stump. He tore the scrap of cloth free and tied it around Betty’s arm just under the shoulder. It was crushingly tight, but Betty could barely feel it, her arm was so cold and numb.

Betty shivered, and once she started she found she couldn’t stop.

“We need to get out of here,” said Jughead. They both felt a strange distant rumble, as if the walls at the other end of the school were beginning to cave in.

“Sure. But you can’t walk and I can barely move, so we’ve got a few obstacles to that,” Betty said, teeth chattering every time she relaxed her jaw enough to speak.

Jughead smiled, tight-lipped and not at all amused at his own wordplay. “Time for teamwork to make our dream work.” He reached out and put his left arm over her shoulder, and braced himself with his right. “You’re going to stand up, I’m going get my leg under me, and then we’re going to three-legged race our way out of here. Ready?”

Betty nodded, though she was already breathing hard. “I’ll do my best.”

The seconds it took them to stand were some of the longest and most excruciating of their lives. Betty struggled to balance with her dead arm, clinging to Jughead with her good one, while he fought to get his leg beneath him, slipping several times in the smear of blood and automail oil that coated the floor around them. Several times Jughead fell flat against the floor, dragging Betty down with him, both of them scrabbling against the smooth floorboards desperately to get up again.

But they managed it at last, though for several seconds after getting to their feet they stood together shakily, both trying to catch their breath. Closer now, there came a rumble of immanent collapse.

“It’s so far back through the building,” said Betty, voice barely audible.

Jughead reached for her left hand where it rested at his shoulder and squeezed it with his own flesh hand. “There’s an emergency exit in the back of the gym. We just have to make it across the room.”

Together they pivoted, turning from the way they’d come, the way Penelope and Chic had left. Betty was tense, straining to hold Jughead up while balancing the dead weight of her arm. She tried to tell herself that the numbness was just the adrenaline and the tourniquet, a safety measure against the unbearable pain, and not a sign that her right arm was dying fast, and maybe dragging the rest of her down with it. But Betty had seen a lot of injuries like this at Sweetwater, thanks to Greendale’s flechette guns. She hoped Jughead was too distracted by his lost leg to be thinking the same thing.

Jughead could not think of anything but Betty. The one advantage he had over her was that now, with his automail leg obliterated, there was not much left to hurt, except for the exposed nerve junction at the base of his stump. So Jughead possessed significantly more room for worry than Betty did, and he was devoting it all to the bleary look in her eyes and the fat drops of blood rolling off her dull purple fingertips. She would die if they didn’t get help soon. Even if they did, she might still lose the arm. Without even thinking about it, Jughead tightened his hold on Betty’s shoulders, pulling them closer together.

Betty wobbled a bit at the sudden movement, and despite everything she laughed softly. Jughead shivered at the weakness of the sound.

“Jug, careful. We’re pretty precarious here.”

“Sorry,” he said, looking away. “Just wanted you to know I’m here.”

“Jug,” she said, and her voice was so thin and strained Jughead felt tears burning at the inner corners of his eyes. “I know you’re here. You’re weighing on me like a sandbag and a half.”

He forced out a laugh. “That’s the downside of automail. Metal arm’s kind of heavy.” In his head, Jughead tried to calculate the distance between them and the emergency exit. They weren’t far now. They’d passed the pedestal, Dr. Curdle’s body, and the coach’s office. They were halfway down the short hall, the exit sign somehow still glowing a diffuse and bloody red despite the long cut power. “Not long now, Betty.”

She was breathing heavily, and he could feel her shaking. Jughead wondered if she was going into shock, and what he would do if she passed out. What he could do.

“Let’s…” Betty had to pause between each word. “Let’s...pick up...the…”

“We’re almost there,” Jughead said, trying to take a step and a half for every one step of hers, pull her forward and out of the building through sheer force of will. Behind them, not far at all now, came the low rumble and rush of air that meant the ceiling in the gym was falling in. Deep behind a curtain of pain and shock and very dull quiet terror, Betty wondered if the whole building had been rigged with explosives, and how many other buildings in Riverdale might be ready to go up at a moment’s notice.

Jughead stretched out his right arm, straining to reach the door handle without overbalancing himself or Betty. He nearly cried the moment he heard the clink of metal on metal that meant he’d reached the handle. Jughead pressed down on the handle bar and mercifully, mercifully the door was unlocked. He and Betty stumbled out into the cool night air, half-walking, half-falling a few more meters until they could carry on no farther. A massive and symphonic crumble and crack echoed around them. Betty and Jughead turned, clinging to each other in order to pivot on their three legs without falling. Together they watched South Side Military Academy collapse, releasing a rank cloud of dust and atomized corpse particles into the air for several meters in all directions. Jughead flinched to feel the greasy dust adhere to his skin, and he and Betty coughed harshly.

“Gross,” said Betty as the dust cleared.

Jughead didn’t speak, but he figured the vigorous scrubbing he was giving his face was answer enough.

“And we didn’t even-” Betty started to speak, but her legs gave out from under her, and she slipped limp to the ground, her face covered in a cold sweat. Without her support, Jughead fell too, hitting the ground hard beside her. He pushed himself up on his one knee and grabbed Betty by the shoulders, pulling her close to him.

“Betty!” Jughead tried to wake her, shaking her shoulders gently, touching her face, feeling for her pulse, but Betty didn’t respond.

“Betty!” Jughead felt a sob rise in his throat, but he bit it back. Not yet. He couldn’t cry, at least not until Betty was safe. He had only one trick left. He and Jellybean had crafted this plan together, but never tested it. And it depended completely on the premise that Jellybean would be watching for it, tonight of any nights. But it was all he had.

Jughead pressed his hands together and then against the ground, stretching as far from Betty as he could without disturbing her. As the alchemical energies sank into the ground, streaks of bright red light spiraled up from the dirt and into the air. Jughead and Jellybean had spent weeks in the summer perfecting the alchemical formula for these makeshift flares, and Jughead still wasn’t sure they’d fly high enough for Jellybean to see them from the Serpents’ camp in the hills. But someone would. Someone had to.

Jughead looked down at Betty, her face bathed in the red light, deep and diffuse as the exit sign they’d just passed beneath. Betty’s eyelids fluttered, and opened. She looked up at him, and smiled deliriously. “All that and we don’t even know if Fuhrer Lodge is responsible for what happened in that place.”

Jughead smiled back, even as he felt tears slipping freely down his face. “Or what the deal is with Penelope and that blond guy.”

“Chic,” Betty corrected, closing her eyes again and taking a deep breath. “Penelope called him Chic.”

Jughead swiped a tear off his chin seconds before it could fall to Betty’s face. “See, you’re barely conscious and you still know more than I do. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“You’ll never find out,” Betty mumbled, but even as she spoke the last word, she left him, her eyes drifting shut. Jughead could still feel her chest rising and falling against his, and so he crushed down the tide of panic rising in his mind, which threatened to blot out everything else.

“Hang on, Betty,” Jughead said. “Jellybean’ll be here any minute.” He wasn’t sure, even as he said it, if it was more a prayer or a platitude. Jughead looked up at the red trails his flare seared into the sky, and hoped Jellybean was watching.


	2. Hello Resistance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Veronica Lodge plays with fire on both the literal and metaphorical planes, and along the way she discovers that Archie's been keeping some things from her, that her parents have been keeping some things from her, that Nick St. Clair is unfortunately not trying to keep anything from her, and that Reggie is an awful housekeeper.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, folks. This chapter is brought to you by the letter T. T stands for thesis, which is why it took me so long to post this chapter!

In Pembrooke House, discord reigned. Veronica Lodge tapped her fork against the edge of her plate, her boredom translating itself into the staccato clink of silver on porcelain. Veronica’s mother’s irritation drilled into her daughter from across the table. The stress of being Riverdale’s Supreme Leader had not taken a visible toll on Hermione Lodge, except in the eyes, which were developing into bottomless black pits.

Veronica rolled her own eyes grandly at her mother. “I can’t believe you and Daddy assigned Archie to a security detail tonight of all nights.”

Her father, Hiram, down at the head of the table, intervened after Hermione turned her gaze on him. “Mija, how were we supposed to know today is your anniversary? You and Archie are just kids. I can hardly believe you’re old enough to have a boyfriend at all.”

Veronica groaned. This conversation again. “I’m sixteen, Daddy. I can drive. I can be drafted. I’m certainly old enough to have a boyfriend, even if you don’t exactly approve of him.”

“Now, Veronica,” her mother began, but her father interrupted.

“Veronica, you know we love Archie. He’s the best intern the mayor’s office has ever had, and we couldn’t get by without him,” said Hiram, setting down his fork and folding his hands on the table before him.

“But you’re happy to send him out on fetch quests even on nights he deserves off,” Veronica replied. As always, she couldn’t believe her parents. She’d asked them to give Archie the night off weeks ago. Their anniversary plans were set weeks ago: a show at the Bijou, dinner at Pop’s, and then...and then they were going back to Archie’s place for the grand finale.

Since the murder of Colonel Andrews in Pop’s, Archie lived, in the few hours he wasn’t working for the Fuhrer and First Husband, by himself in his family house. Veronica worried about him all alone there, with only his father’s ghost and his memories of Sweetwater for company. But in recent weeks Veronica noticed Archie softening and relaxing. Something had changed for the better, and, as she’d confided in Kevin just the week before, she thought Archie was finally ready to take their relationship to the next level, and, more importantly, finally ready to eat in Pop’s again.

“I don’t think trauma works that way, Veronica,” Kevin told her. “It’s a really sticky thing, and it ebbs and flows. My dad told me about some of his old war buddies, how the littlest things stayed lodged in their brains.”

“Oh, Kevin, if that’s true, then why isn’t everyone in Riverdale completely crazy in the coconuts?” Veronica replied, Kevin narrowing his eyes at her skeptically.

“I’m just saying, be careful with Archie. There’s no ‘over it’ with this stuff. I was at Sweetwater. I know.”

Veronica told herself after that that was the last time she would listen to Kevin’s psychological advice. He was overprotective of everyone, just like his dad, head of the watch,

So Veronica went ahead with planning her andArchie’s anniversary night, assuming her parents were listening when she’d asked for him to have the night off. Evidently she’d been stupid to think that they would listen to her.

Veronica tossed her fork down onto the spotless white tablecloth, and took a perverse pleasure in the splotch of grease it left on there. Waves of resentment rolled off her mother and into the stain as Hermione stared fixedly at it. Veronica smiled to herself. It might not be the Russian Revolution, but it was a place to start. She pushed her chair back from the table, and stood, smoothing the skirt of her Armondi EasyDress (Black).

“Well, Mother, Daddy, I think I’ll turn in for the night. I seem to have lost my appetite. Maybe it’s the stink of deceit that’s everywhere these days.”

Hiram pressed his eyes shut as if trying to delete the comment from his memory. “Look, Mija, I didn’t want to tell you this because I knew you’d be upset. If you really must know-”

“I really must,” Veronica said, grinning. Victory was hers.

“I did remember that you wanted the night off for Archie. But this assignment he’s on is an emergency. He’s out with the Red Circle.”

Veronica blinked, unable to fully process the thought. “The Red Circle? Daddy, he’s just a kid.”

Hiram shook his head. “He’s my most trusted lieutenant. He’s done everything your mother and I asked of him. He deserves this. The Red Circle located one of our most wanted fugitives holed up in the middle of town. He’s a monster, and your mother and I agreed he needs to be out of our town, one way or the other. So we sent Archie to help with the capture. There’s simply no one we trust more.”

“Daddy, you can’t!” said Veronica, taking a step back, careful not to put too much weight on the heel of her razor-thin stilettos. “It’s too dangerous! Not only is Archie just a teen, he’s still recovering from his dad’s death! And Sweetwater! And the bear! He can’t go into a fight”

Hermione intervened. “Veronica, he’ll be fine. He needs the exposure if he’s ever going to get back to normal. He needs a sense of purpose. He can’t just be your boyfriend forever. Especially not after everything he saw at Sweetwater.”

Veronica almost stomped her foot, and then thought better of it, remembering how much her shoes had cost. “I don’t even know what happened at Sweetwater! No one will tell me, and you kept me here while everyone else went! Archie came home like The Deer Hunter, and he’s only been worse off since that bear attack, not to mention his dad dying in front of his eyes!”

“Veronica, calm down,” said Hermione. “This will help Archie. I promise. He needs to get back into the rhythm of things. That’s all.”

“The rhythm of things?” Veronica said, glaring at her mother with fresh hatred. “This is life we’re talking about here, not Dance Dance Revolution. As far as Archie’s concerned, the rhythm of his life is one tragedy after the next! I’m not going to let you send him into another combat zone.”

Veronica turned on her heel, and stormed out of the dining room. She didn’t run, not that she couldn’t, even in these heels, but she didn’t want her parents to think she had somewhere else to be, other than her bedroom. Veronica shut the door behind her as she entered, and clicked the lock into place. Then she grabbed the chair she always kept by the doorway, letting the numerous empty Glamazon boxes stacked on it fall to the floor in a heap. She wedged the chair under the doorknob, sure that it’d at least keep out Smithers and maybe even Andre, at least for as long as she needed.

With that done, Veronica reached under her bed and pulled out her pearl-white authentic vintage Luccini duffle. The tag on it, which usually read “Veronica Lodge, Pembrooke House, Riverdale”, had recently been replaced by an index card reading “Anniversary Plan B”. Veronica hadn’t thought her parents would fail her so utterly, but she’d prepared for something to go wron: it was always like this in Riverdale. She unzipped the duffle bag, and pulled out her treasured matte black LoLitaLemon jogging suit. It fit like a glove, and the flexibility was to die for. It was perfect, in short, for making a daring escape from her parents’ heavily guarded citadel.

Veronica slipped out of her dress and into the tracksuit, stepping out of her heels and sliding her feet into high-top Stag & Chrome sneakers. They weren’t exactly made for stealth missions, but Veronica knew from experience that if she could run in stilettos, she could run in anything.

Veronica stepped to the window, about to lift the latch, but hesitated. She went to the mirror of her vanity and considered the string of pearls still clipped around her neck. She reached back and opened the clasp, letting the necklace fall limp into her hand, then flicked open her jewelry box and dropped the pearls on top, snapping down the lid with a satisfying sense of finality.

“Try to stop me now, Daddy,” she murmured, and then returned to the window.

It slid open in perfect silence, thanks to weeks of careful oiling for midnight rendezvous with Archie in the Rose Garden. Veronica had this method of exit down to a science, and she was out of the room and tearing across the great green lawn, window closed carefully behind her, in less than a minute.

It helped of course that the Lodges only occupied the ground floor of Pembrooke House. The rest of the place was empty, as far as Veronica knew, but as she jogged quickly across the lawn towards the hedge maze, she glanced back and saw a dull gold light in one of the upper windows. She almost tripped, her feet finding a divot hidden by the grass, and stopped for a moment to stare up across the lawn, wondering who could be up there, and if they could see her.

Heart pounding, Veronica made for the entrance to the hedge maze and slipped through the opening in the thick boxwood bushes. She made a mental note to increase her daily cardio from thirty minutes to forty-five, and to start running more often, but even as she made those resolutions, Veronica admitted to herself that the insistent thud in her chest was not only due to her recent lax approach to exercise. She had been seen. She was sure of it, even though no one had been at the window when she looked. She had felt unfriendly eyes on her. And worse, unfriendly eyes she didn’t know. Her parents, she could handle. They would only be able to crack down for a day or two before their resolve would break and they’d shower her with gifts to make up for their cruelty. That was fine.

Veronica didn’t like being watched by someone she didn’t know, though. They had no right. If they were in a secret residence in the upper floors of Pembrooke House, then they must be a guest of her parents, and that meant some kind of political connections. And, in Veronica’s experience, that meant some kind of creepy old man who liked to leave his hand on her knee or across her shoulders for far too long. To be seen by one of them, and to not at least see him back, was a violation.

Veronica shivered, and tried to put herself back in order, squaring her shoulders and taking a deep breath. Whoever or whatever her parents’ mysterious guest was, they would have to wait. Priority One was Archie. While Veronica hated to admit Kevin was right about Archie’s mental state, it was true: Archie couldn’t be sent back into combat, not after the bear attack and his father’s death and, worst of all, Sweetwater. And especially not on their anniversary!

Veronica realized then that she had no idea where Archie and the Red Circle were, and cursed herself for not weaseling the information out of her father while she had the chance. But no matter. First, she would get off of Pembrooke premises. Then she’d figure where Archie was. Veronica had a particularly stellar informant at her disposal. She just had to get to him first.

Veronica set off, careful to keep count of the sprays of bright yellow forsythia which marked the way through the maze. Veronica knew from talking with Betty and Archie, and Colonel Andrews before his death, that forsythia was chosen for the signal because the maze was planted by FP Jones, before his disappearance, when he was Riverdale’s beloved handyman, and not yet known as the terrorist leader of the South Side Serpents. Veronica always wanted to ask Jughead how he felt about this, whether he was ever angry at his dad for passing down so much trouble to his son. But Jughead refused to talk about it, at least to her. It was a bit annoying.

Still, it was sweet that Mr. Jones chose to mark the path with the flower for which his daughter was named, thought Veronica, admiring the bright sprigs of forsythia jutting forth between the box hedges. Veronica didn’t meet Jellybean until after the girl lost her body, so she never knew JB as the sweet little girl Archie, Betty, and Jughead always spoke of, but Veronica liked Jellybean well enough now as the two meter tall mech and all-star mechanic she’d become. Veronica didn’t think Jellybean’s new appearance was so off-putting. Sure, she was very tall, and weighed almost a thousand kilograms, and had a gun built into her arm, and spoke like a walkie-talkie come to life, but there was some essential good in Jellybean that couldn’t be hidden, even in her boxy robot form. Or at least that was how Veronica thought of her.

Unlike Jughead, Jellybean was happy to talk about anything with anyone, and she and Veronica spoke long and often about the myriad complexities of their relationships with their fathers. For an eleven-year-old, Jellybean could get quite philosophical. Veronica recalled one night in particular, sitting out front of Pop’s in the bed of Archie’s truck while the others went in to pick up the carry-out. Veronica was waiting outside with Jellybean and Archie, since Jellybean couldn’t fit in any of the booths or on any of the stools with her massive steel beam legs, and Archie couldn’t enter the restaurant without breaking into a cold sweat and curling into a ball of tension that radiated discomfort twenty feet in every direction. So, while Archie paced around the parking lot, muttering to himself about the Black Hood and vengeance, Veronica and Jellybean sat on the edge of the truck bed, and talked.

“Did your dad teach you to do alchemy?” Veronica asked, watching Jellybean clap her olive-drab titanium hands together and then press them against the metal of the truck bed. Blue sparks of alchemical energy played across her grey-green fingers, and when Jellybean lifted her hands, the paint had parted in three places, leaving her initials, FPJ, inscribed on the metal.

A small fond laugh burst from Jellybean’s speaker, scattered with pops of interference. “Not like this, of course. He still has to use circles, and so he taught us that way. But we wouldn’t have started alchemy without him.”

Veronica smiled. “That’s nice, to have something in common with your dad.”

Jellybean shrugged, the gesture accompanied by the whir of servos in her shoulders. “I don’t even know if he’s alive, so I can’t say if we really have much in common anymore, but it sure was fun when I was a kid.”

“Jellybean,” said Veronica, laughing, “You’re still a kid! You’re only eleven.”

“No,” Jellybean said, and her voice was somber, even through the obscuring buzz and crackle of the speaker which acted as her mouth. “I’m not a kid anymore. You can’t live like I do, and call yourself a child.”

Veronica reached out, putting a hand on Jellybean’s cold arm. “I’m sorry, Jellybean. I didn’t mean to upset you. I just mean, you haven’t been around as long as we have.”

“It’s alright,” said Jellybean, her voice now impossible to read, robotically flat. “You can’t understand what it’s like, to be this. I know your hand is right there, I know you’re touching me, but I can’t feel anything except a faint sense of its presence. I’m not human anymore, Veronica. I’m not like any of you anymore, body or soul. Not even Jug.” Jellybean paused, and Veronica wondered if Jellybean would have liked to sigh in that moment, what it must be like to speak without feeling the air in your chest waiting to deliver your thoughts to the world.

“Please don’t tell Jug I said that, though. He blames himself,” Jellybean finished, her bright LED eyes flicking to meet Veronica’s human ones, and then flicking away.

“Why would he blame himself?” Veronica asked, curious as to what could penetrate Jughead’s infinite ironic remove, other than anything Betty said to him.

“They told us, when we woke up at Riverdale General, that we lost my body and Jughead’s arm and leg trying to use alchemy to resurrect our mother, that we dabbled with forces beyond our understanding, and that’s why we can do alchemy without a transmutation circle now. But that’s not what I remember.”

Veronica raised her eyebrows. “Who told you this? What do you remember?” She suspected she knew exactly who told them, and dreaded the answer.

“The last thing I remember,” said Jellybean, speaking slowly and deliberately, “Is our foxhole, on the bank of the river. A mortar landed in it, and in that one second where I had time to think, really think about how Jug and I were going to die, were going to be obliterated, I pushed him away from the shell. And then it went off. And then I woke up like this.” She raised one hand and wiggled the two-centimeter thick fingers.

“That doesn’t leave you a lot of time to ill-fatedly resurrect your mother, does it?” said Veronica. “It sounds to me like you were sold a cover story. And quite sloppily constructed, I might add. But by whom?”

“That’s the thing,” said Jellybean, watching Archie put in his paces, ten parking spaces forward, pivot, ten spaces back. “It was your parents that told us. The Fuhrer and First Husband, personally attending us.”

Veronica pinched her lips together in a thin white line, wondering if the Jones siblings were the latest victims of RD R&D. “Okay. Have you talked about this with Jughead?”

“I’ve tried, but you know how he is. Jughead’s my best friend, my hero, but if something can be about his own failures and his grand mistakes, then it must be. He believes what your parents told us. He doesn’t even remember the foxhole,” Jellybean said, drawing her knees up to her chest. Her legs folded into place with a hollow clunk.

“Jellybean, don’t bring this up with Betty or Jughead. I promise you, I’m going to get to the bottom of this, but I don’t want them butting in to play Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boy while I try to get real work done. This operation calls for finesse. So naturally it calls for Veronica Lodge.” Veronica winked at Jellybean, and they both laughed. Veronica had become used to Jellybean’s electronic stutter of a giggle. She was fond of it. Jellybean was a good kid.

Veronica replayed this conversation in her head as she navigated towards the secret exit of the hedge maze. Every time she saw forsythia, she thought of Jellybean and the little girl’s carefully hidden trauma. Veronica swore once again that she would figure out what her parents were up to, and restore Jellybean’s body if she could. The girl deserved at least one person besides Jughead looking out for her.

Veronica rounded the last corner and stopped in the face of a dead end, capped with a sprawling yellow forsythia bush. She took her phone from her pocket and slipped a pair of headphones into the jack, counting herself lucky once again that she hadn’t sprung for the new SpyPhone, which required a ridiculous adapter to connect to headphones. Her dad had managed to lose his three times already. She popped the earbuds into place, and turned on her favorite song of the moment. It wasn’t a real hit, except in Riverdale, just a recording of Josie in the band room at school, singing along to an old song about starting a fire in your heart. Josie sounded so happy to be singing, even though the song was sad. Veronica liked to start every secret mission with it. It was appropriate. Veronica had every intention of starting a fire or two herself.

Confident she now appeared the perfect picture of an innocuous jogger, Veronica slid her phone into her sleeve’s zippered pocket, and dropped to her knees, crawling beneath the forsythia, threading her way beneath the canopy of low-hanging branches. Maybe FP Jones hadn’t intended this as a secret exit after all, she reflected as she felt splinters of mulch dig into her palms and sticks catch on her hair. She was going to look like a hobo now, she always did. But Veronica reminded herself that very few hobos were lucky enough to own such a carefully composed jogging ensemble. She would tell her informant she fell on the way.

Emerging from the bush, Veronica then faced the fence which surrounded all of Pembrooke House. Here behind the hedge maze, however, the fence had fallen into disarray long ago, and never been repaired. After FP Jones, a rotating cast of contractors, repairmen, and general fix-it types circulated in and out of Pembrooke House, never staying long enough to get around to the loneliest portions of the sprawling grounds.

There was one particular fence slat which bore the comforting equation “AA + VL = ♡”. Veronica smiled as she slid the loose board aside. Archie might not be a master of algebra, but he could handle the basic formulae of life. As she slipped out onto the sidewalk of 4th Avenue, Veronica thought back to the day Archie carved those letters into the fence. It wasn’t long after he’d come back from Sweetwater, and they’d spent the whole day in the hospital with Jellybean and Jughead. Betty was still in psych, and nothing they said to Dr. Caligari convinced him to let them see her. Jellybean wasn’t speaking, and Jughead was dead-eyed and laconic. It was a difficult day.

After, they sat in the center of the hedge maze, Archie closed-off and quiet, Veronica feeling stretched beyond her boundaries, wondering how to reach any of her friends. She laid down beside Archie on the grass, and together they watched the clouds go by, scudding silently across the sky above them. It was a long time before Veronica decided to risk speaking.

“How are you doing, Archiekins?” she asked, very quiet, one hand on his in the grass.

She heard the grass whisper as he rolled onto his side to look at her. “Not great, Ronnie. It was really rough out there. I didn’t have it as bad as Betty and Jughead...or Jellybean. But it was really rough. I don’t know what to do now that we’re back home. Especially without my dad.” His voice sounded strong as ever, until he reached “home”, and he broke with a sharp, clear note like crystal hitting a marble floor.

“You can tell me about it,” said Veronica, turning her head to look at him. His face looked strange sideways in the grass, green stalks reaching up along his chin and cheekbone, the tears streaking across his face instead of down, gathering on the bridge of his nose, sliding off his cheek and dissolving into the grass.

“Not yet, Ronnie,” said Archie. “I can’t talk about it with anyone yet.”

“Okay,” she said, but her heart caved in, wondering what it was like to carry that kind of a burden, all alone. “But how about this? You’ll come visit me, whenever you can. We’ll talk about whatever you want, until you can talk about what happened. You’ll be able to move on. No more Arch, Interrupted.”

“I think I can try that, yeah,” he said, smiling. Veronica smiled back, but even as Archie leaned forward to kiss her, she couldn’t shake the image of his smiling face, sideways in the grass. Something was off about it from that angle. With his face halfway buried in the grass, his eyes unfocused with grief, even while smiling, he looked wrong. He looked like the pictures of war dead in their history textbook.

But Veronica stamped out that thought, and pressed herself against him closer than before, hoping the contact would clear her mind, or at least obliterate that thought. Creepy as she felt doing it, she kept opening her eyes while they made out, watching Archie’s face shift from desire to pleasure to relief, and she took comfort in seeing that play of feeling across his face, assuring her that he was still alive.

When they were finished, Veronica led Archie to the forsythia bush and the loose board in the fence, explaining the secret of the hedge maze. Archie carved their initials into the plank, promising her he would visit often and that they would talk, about everything. And Archie did come to her many times, in the hedge maze, in the Rose Garden, sometimes in her room if he promised to be very quiet. But they never got as far as she wanted. Somehow, the closer they got to talking about Sweetwater, about Archie’s dad, about the bear attack, the more Archie evaded, turning the moment into something not so psychological.

The pattern became so glaring that Veronica decided to make their anniversary the day they would finally go all the way. Maybe in the afterglow Archie would open up.

But leave it to her parents to ruin that. And now she was chasing Archie down, instead of having him go down on her. It was frustrating, to say the least.

So caught up in this tangle of romantic, therapeutic, and sexual frustration was Veronica that she barely caught herself in time at the intersection of 4th and Main. A truck tore through the red light, just seconds after she skidded to stop at the edge of the sidewalk. It passed so close to her that a draft tossed her hair, and the apologetic honk that followed was nearly deafening. She watched the car’s tail lights disappear down the street. It looked like the Serpents’ truck, and it was coming from the hills, where Betty said they were currently holed up.

Veronica tapped her foot impatiently while she waited for the light to change. She wasn’t going to take any more chances crossing the street now. It would be just like Riverdale for her to be hit by a truck when she was about to save Archie. Still, even as she actively resisted her own impulse to distraction, Veronica wondered where the Serpents were going so urgently. It would be very like Jughead to have gotten into trouble, and she hoped he hadn’t dragged Betty in too deep with him.

Veronica jogged two more blocks south, seeing no one except a silent security officer, posted at the corner in front of the Riverdale Register, waiting for Alice Cooper to finish up her day’s work. Alice was under 24/7 “police protection” ever since the story she published about working conditions in the SoDale Industrial Complex. Veronica wondered if her parents knew how who’d put those shocking on-the-job injury statistics into Alice’s hands.

Emboldened, Veronica waved to the policeman, and then picked up the pace as she rounded the corner, closing in on her destination. She stopped in front of Pop’s, unplugging and coiling up her earbuds under the cool neon light of the sign. Then she went around back, knocking gently on the cellar doors set into the ground behind Pop’s. The code was the opening three notes to the theme of Twin Peaks. It was difficult to carry off correctly, but not impossible. Veronica felt it lacked without the horn section, though.

Hearing someone on the cellar stairs, Veronica took a step back, not a moment too soon as the doors swung out in a wide arc, revealing her informant in all his mildly disheveled glory. Reggie Mantle, self-proclaimed Mantle the Magnificent, stood in the entrance to the cellar, hair messy, clothes rumpled, smiling wide.

“Ronnie! I didn’t think you were coming tonight!” he said, shifting to make way for her, and gesturing for her to descend into the basement.

Veronica stepped into the opening and down the stairs lightly, hearing the doors thud closed behind her and Reggie slide the deadbolt back in place. “To tell you the truth, Reggie, I wasn’t planning to stop by, but my parents have meddled again, and I’m not letting this one go.”

Veronica reached the end of the stairs and emerged into a comfortably appointed lounge. Once this basement had been her hangout and virgin speakeasy, La Bonne Nuit, but her parents grew tired of her spending all her time at work and yanked her business license. Now it was Reggie’s pad, where he stayed rent-free as long as he kept Veronica apprised of all the news she missed from her perch high atop Riverdale’s socio-economic hierarchy. Reggie didn’t quite treat it the way she would. His things were strewn everywhere, and a strange musty, ashen smell, something like burnt hair, permeated the whole room.

“Aw, geez,” Reggie said, sliding past her to go to the bar, where he grabbed two drinks, offering one to Veronica. “They really called down the Wrath of the Titan this time, didn’t they?”

“That’s what I like about you, Reggie,” she replied, taking the glass he offered. It was her favorite: a virgin dark’n’stormy, in a tall glass. “You take me seriously, and you always have my favorite cocktail ready.”

Reggie flopped down in the nearest booth, taking a sip of his own drink as he sprawled across the red leather cushions. “I’ve spent enough time with you to take everything you say seriously, Ronnie. Plus,” and here he gestured to the shell of La Bonne Nuit, still well-appointed but filling rapidly with the debris of Reggie’s daily life, mainly dirty socks, “you put me up down here, so it’s the least I can do to make you feel welcome, considering I’m a pretty terrible housekeeper.”

Veronica nodded. “We do need to talk about your housekeeping habits, Reggie.”

Reggie blanched. “Now? But aren’t you here for gossip? Scoops maybe? I’ve been cultivating a snitch with the Ghoulies lately, and I know where they’re getting the Fizzle Rocks these days.”

“I’m not interested in the Ghoulies tonight, Reggie,” said Veronica, sitting down in a chair beside him, resting her feet on a towering and perilously poorly balanced pile of gym clothes and football pads. “I want to know about the Red Circle.”

Reggie nodded slowly, and took another long drink before he spoke. “The Red Circle’s a tough crowd. People call them the Fuhrer’s answer to the South Side Serpents, but I like to think of them as more like the Turnbull ACs to the Serpents’ Warriors.”

Veronica rolled her eyes. “Reggie, I only understood that reference because we watched that movie together. You have to cool it with the action movie jokes. This is Riverdale, we only do noir.” She smiled and tossed her hair, imagining herself for a moment as the femme fatale, pulling the burned out detective into a mess he’ll never forget.

“I think you’re missing out,” said Reggie, shrugging. “I’ve got some good ones in my collection. Been considering _Terminator 2_ lately. If you want,” and he sat up as he said this, betraying a certain investment in the answer, “We could watch it tonight. Or something else. I just got the projector hooked back up.”

Veronica shook her head, and said “Reggie, the Red Circle. I need to find them tonight.”

“Alright, alright,” he said, deflating back into a sprawl. “I don’t know much about the day-to-day there, I have to warn you. The only person I can get info about them from is Dilton Doiley, and all he does is push their paper and put together their guns.”

“But I know you’ve got something worth knowing, right, Reggie?” Veronica said, gesturing for him to go on.

“Well, I do always manage to get more from Dilton than he plans. Last time we met up, he had a few too many and let slip that the Circle was planning a big hit. Apparently they’ve been casing out the VIP floor of the Five Seasons for weeks now. Someone’s holed up in there, and they’re a real enemy of the state. Not only is the Fuhrer sending her most trusted troops, but the RDPD is shutting down the whole perimeter. If you’re planning on busting in there, it’s going to be real tricky.”

“I’ll figure something out,” said Veronica. She almost stood up, but a sudden thought kept her sitting, watching Reggie, who blinked back curiously.

“You okay, Ronnie?”

“Reggie,” Veronica said, “Don’t take this the wrong way.”

“Uh. Okay. I’ll do my best to take it however you want,” said Reggie, now a little worried.

“You were at Sweetwater, right? What happened there? Everyone always talks around it like I’ll die just from hearing about it.” As she said this, she looked right into Reggie’s eyes, and saw with satisfaction her patented Veronica Lodge Perfect Pleading Face reflected back at her.

“Well, I guess I can tell you what I saw, but I drove an ambulance, so you’re not going to get any Band of Brothers stuff out of it,” Reggie said, scratching the back of his neck nervously.

“That’s fine, Reggie. You’re the first person who’ll tell me anything, and that means a lot already. I can handle whatever you’ve got. I’m not just a princess, even if my parents did lock me in a tower for the whole Engagement.”

Reggie laughed. “In a tower? Really?”

“Well, I may be exaggerating a bit,” she admitted. “But not by much. I don’t think they let me take a step outside of Pembrooke House until Greendale officially surrendered.”

“I guess I understand,” Reggie said, sitting up to look her in the eyes as he spoke. “I wouldn’t have wanted to see you out there either. It might have been small, numbers-wise, but it was real war. When the draft came down for all high school students, and then the middle school kids too, I was scared. I’m not going to lie to you. I didn’t want to go down there. I’d heard all the stories about Greendale, the monsters, the demons, everything. So when I got my assignment to drive, I was relieved. I thought it couldn’t be that bad. And I’d be heroic, you know? The one saving all your Private Ryans and stuff.”

“Of course. And once you got out there? Did you see any of our friends?”

Reggie swallowed, and his voice sounded thick, like it was wrapped in cloth or cotton balls. “I did. In the ambulance. My car took Jughead in after his foxhole went up. You know it’s not far from the river’s edge to the hospital, but driving back from the front, seeing him bleeding out in my rearview mirror, it was the longest ten minutes of my life. I always hated Jughead in school. We fought...we fought all the time. But seeing him there, missing...all that, no beanie, nothing that made him Jughead. He was so close to death he wasn’t a person anymore. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Nobody should go like that. And I saw plenty of kids go like that.”

Veronica reached out and took Reggie’s hand, squeezing it tightly. He squeezed back, once, but his grip was soft and cold. “I’m sorry you had to see that, Reggie. But that’s what I don’t understand: why did my mother send high school students, and then middle schoolers, out there, out to a war front?”

“I can’t answer that one, Ronnie,” said Reggie, folding his arms tightly across his chest. “I saw a lot of the adult soldiers laid up, sure, but there were still people on the border, just like there are now. I guess maybe they were hoping to scare the bad guys into giving up rather than kill kids, but I never even saw a Greendale soldier the whole time I was down there. And I don’t know anyone who did. Everybody just fired blindly across the river, and somebody on the other side kept raining hell down on us right back.”

“And all because we couldn’t agree on who owns the Sweetwater.” Veronica sighed. “I’ve never understood why the governor didn’t intervene.”

“I don’t really believe there’s a governor out there,” said Reggie, staring up at the blank black ceiling. “You ever get the feeling that Riverdale’s all there is? My whole life, I’ve never gone farther than the banks of the Sweetwater.”

“There must be a governor,” said Veronica. “There’s a state, isn’t there? Where else would all our things come from? I get Glamazon deliveries daily, they have to come from somewhere.”

“Do any of us know what they make in SoDale? Maybe it all comes out of there. When was the last time you remember doing something or seeing something that you were really, really sure came from outside Riverdale?” Reggie said, his eyes bright with certainty. He was leaning forward, Sweetwater seemingly forgotten. “When was the last time you remember leaving Riverdale?”

“I’ve been to-” But Veronica had to stop and consider. She knew she had traveled to New York any number of times. She had so many things she’d bought there, so many stories her parents had told her. But when she tried to summon any certain, individual memory of New York, anything she was sure wasn’t a back formation from her parents’ tales, her thoughts slipped through her fingers and turned to dust. “I think I’ve been to New York.” Veronica felt her blood pressure rise, heartbeat pounding in her ears. “I don’t know. I really don’t know. I don’t remember.”

Reggie slid off the bench and to her side, putting an arm around her shoulders, taking her hand. “Hey, Ronnie, calm down. I didn’t mean to scare you like that. I just think it’s weird. I mean, weirder than anything else around here.”

Veronica took two deep breaths, feeling her heart slow and her panic fade to a background buzz. “It is weird, you’re right. I just never thought about it like that.” She smiled at Reggie. “You don’t think we’re going to get Villaged, do you?”

Reggie laughed. “You mean, get hit with a Shyamalan twist? I wouldn’t put it past your parents at this point. Maybe Riverdale is some kind of secret cult hideout, and we’ll walk out one day and everyone else in the world has a jetpack, living in 2094.”

Veronica couldn’t help but laugh too. “My parents wouldn’t try something like that. There’s no money in it.”

Veronica stood, and Reggie did too, not letting go of her hand. On an impulse, Veronica hugged him tightly, feeling a great sense of relief as his arms encircled her. “Thank you for sharing all this with me, Reggie. I couldn’t manage this jet-setting double life as First Daughter and first-rate crisis intervention specialist without my inimitable information broker.”

“No problem,” he said, and his voice sounded stuffy again. “Gotta do something to earn my keep around here.” He pulled away, and went to the bar. “I’ve got something else for you, if you’re really going to go wading into a Red Circle operation.” He reached under the bar, and pulled out a pair of small white gloves. They were made of a strange rough fiber, thick enough for the individual strands to be visible, even from where Veronica stood, more than a meter away. Red transmutation circles were carefully stitched into the backs of both gloves. Something in the red thread seemed to flicker with a warm light, like a candle in a dark room.

Reggie offered the gloves to Veronica. “You’ve studied some alchemy, right?”

“Yeah, of course,” she replied as she took them, running the strange material between her fingers. She found it surprisingly pleasant, the way the fibers adhered to the ridges of her fingerprints as if they were two pieces of a puzzle sliding together. “I’m not Paracelsus, but I’ve never had problem booting one up or getting the transmutation right.”

“Good,” said Reggie, slipping around the bar to stand beside her. “Because these gloves are really something else. I dug them up in the RDPD evidence locker.”

Veronica was only half listening as she examined the transmutation circles stitched into the gloves. “This looks like a circle for pulling oxygen out of the air. Why?”

“Well,” said Reggie, taking a few steps back, towards a chair Veronica hadn’t noticed before. It was covered in a white sheet, but the floor around it was oddly blackened, scorched even.

“Is this-” Veronica almost couldn’t finish her question, and instinctively her hand tightened around the gloves. “Is this flame alchemy?”

“Yep,” said Reggie, trying to stand so his feet covered the scorch marks in the floor.

“So the gloves make sparks with the friction from the material, and then they light up all the oxygen you just made, in whatever direction you want,” Veronica said, filled with the desire to put them on. The sound alone must be incredible. In these two little pieces of cloth was the power to upend everything. Let her parents just try to keep her out of danger now. She was danger.

Reggie scuffed his heel against the scorch marks on the floor, clearly hoping they would rub away. They remained steadfastly in place, marring the shiny floor. Veronica realized why Reggie had covered the chair with a sheet. “What was it, exactly,” she asked, “that made you think you should test these out in my bar?”

Reggie blushed. “It was a mistake on my part, no doubt there. But it wasn’t as bad as it could have been! I had the fire extinguisher, just like you’re supposed to in a place like this.”

Seeing Veronica glare pointedly at the sheet, Reggie slowly lifted it, a miserable expression on his face. The chair was not what it used to be. The wood was burnt black, carbonized and crumbling in places, and all that remained of the cushion were a few singed tufts of stuffing and a partially melted spring. Veronica noticed a greasy black smoke stain on the ceiling above it, and below the chair the floor was just as heavily charred. Every part of the chair and the floor below it was coated in the grey-white dust left behind by the fire extinguisher. Beneath the chair, shoved between its legs, was the fire extinguisher itself. It looked oddly bedraggled, as if putting out Reggie’s mistake had cost it more life than it could bear to give.

Reggie was hunching inward as if preparing to be berated. But it was so very recklessly Reggie of him to nearly torch the bar that Veronica couldn’t bear to shame him. It was sometimes useful not to fear consequences, or even consider them. Instead of complaining, she said “You really could have thought that one out better, Reggie.”

“Yeah.”

“But I do like to consider myself merciful. It’s one of the things that my parents and I don’t agree on. So we’ll call it even for giving me the gloves, if you also replace the chair.”

Reggie saluted, hopping to attention. “Your wish is my command, Colonel Lodge!”

Veronica rolled her eyes in response. “At ease, Mr. Mantle. Try not to destroy any more of my bar from now on.”

Reggie laughed nervously, scratching the back of his neck again. “I’ll do my best, Ronnie.” He looked around at his grand collection of crap, and shrugged sheepishly. “Maybe I’ll do some cleaning before the next time you come through.”

Veronica shoved the gloves into her pocket, and gave him a winning smile. “The ladies love a guy who can keep house, Reggie. It’ll be good for you.”

Reggie smiled back. “Be careful out there. The Red Circle doesn’t mess around. Make sure you aim real careful with those gloves too. They go big if you’re, uh, not too great with alchemy.”

“I appreciate the concern, Reggie dear, but don’t worry. Since when has Veronica Lodge been faced with trouble she couldn’t handle?” Veronica replied as she went to the stairs.

“You don’t want me to answer that honestly, right?” Reggie called after her. Veronica laughed, and left the bar, letting the basement door fall shut behind her with a clatter.

Outside Veronica paused at the edge of the parking lot, sizing up the ugly little shrubs Pop had planted along the property line. She reached into her pocket and felt the flame alchemy gloves, folded there in a state of quiet repose. Some of the bushes were long dead, brown and dry for ages. It would be good to practice before she got to the Five Seasons. She didn't want to Reggie it.

Veronica shook her head, trying to wring the temptation out. Pop didn't need his front lawn on fire. He was lucky Reggie hadn't burned the whole place down already, messing around with flame alchemy. She would be able to figure the gloves out if she really needed to. All she wanted was to rescue Archie, and surely that could be accomplished without violence.

Veronica took off down the sidewalk, not bothering to put her earbuds back in and keep up the illusion of being a mere jogger. She didn’t have time for that now. She’d spent more time with Reggie than she’d planned, which was its own ongoing problem. Back when they’d been in school full-time, before Principal Weatherbee cut school to half-days, and everyone other than Betty and Jughead stopped showing up, Reggie always acted something of a cad. He fought with Jughead, tormented Archie, mocked Betty, and mostly ignored Veronica. The only person he got along with was Cheryl, probably because they were both mean as snakes. But as the year went on, and Veronica saw less and less of Archie, busy as an intern, and Betty, who’d withdrawn from everyone after her big fight with Archie, Veronica began to see more and more of Reggie, as there was no one else to see, and she realized that Reggie, while he might not be much brighter than Archie when it came to school, had a quiet cunning that made him an excellent snitch and spy. While he was showing off his muscles and his muscle car to anyone who would pay attention, he was tracking everything people were saying, what they watched, who they gravitated towards. And he was funny, sometimes even on purpose.

After Sweetwater, down and out on a dishonorable discharge, Reggie came to her before anyone else, looking for a place to stay. Since he moved into La Bonne Nuit, Veronica had made a habit of stopping by there once a week, catching up on gossip and goings-on around town, and usually watching a movie of Reggie’s choice. They were all dumb action flicks, but Veronica enjoyed the lightness of it, of Reggie. He was almost weightless, and that was a kind of comfort.

Veronica never felt it necessary to mention these hang-outs to Archie. Somehow they just always fell on evenings when her parents planned to send Archie out on business anyway. Not that Archie would be jealous. Not that she felt guilty.

Anyway, she told herself, how could Archie feel jealous now? She met up with Reggie tonight specifically to save Archie, and that alone proved her connection with Reggie valuable. He was a good friend, and Veronica felt very in need of friends sometimes.

Even a block away from the intersection of Main Street and 1st Avenue, the official site of “Downtown Riverdale”, Veronica could see the bright red and blue splashes of light that meant the police barricade was already up. She slowed to a walk, and moved in closer, stopping beneath a shadowy corner of the Sowerberry Law Office’s roof. The police were everywhere. Official blue and gold-striped barriers blocked the road on either end of the block, and a second layer cordoned off the area directly in front of the Five Seasons. Officers leaned on the barricades, shooed away pedestrians, and generally milled about. Veronica wondered at the number of officers around. Riverdale was a small town, and it always seemed like half the population was in policing, and the other half in gangs.

Still, Veronica had known a few of the officers in her time, and the fifty percent of the population on the force tended to also be the lower fiftieth percentile of town intellectually speaking. So she slid along the wall of the Sowerberry Building, keeping to the shadows. She watched the officers carefully, waiting for one of them to spot her and yank her out into the light. None of them looked her way. Several cars were pulled up to the edge of the barricade, people climbing out to complain about being late to their show at the Bijou.

Veronica watched the conversation get heated: two men and two women, maybe a double date, argued loudly with an officer about whether the police possessed the right to make them leave the scene. These people must be new to Riverdale, thought Veronica. The police had the right to do just about anything her mother wanted them to.

The cop drew his nightstick and took a swing at one of the men. He hit the ground hard. Veronica noticed the man was wearing a red shirt. Maybe he was a labor agitator out of SoDale Village, the workers’ settlement around SoDale Industrial Complex. Maybe things were about to go her way. They weren’t going the way of the red, that was for sure. Veronica watched, wincing, as the cop took another swing at the fallen man (he was an enemy of the state, after all), and his companions fell on the cop, grabbing his nightstick away, forcing him to the ground next to his victim. Immediately, the other officers abandoned the barricades and the entrance to the Five Seasons, and swarmed the scene. Everything was left unguarded.

Not wasting a second, Veronica broke from the shadows, and ran across the street, straight for the revolving glass door of the Five Seasons. She forced herself not to look back at the brawl, even as she heard a scream and the crack of a skull on pavement. There was nothing she could do for the reds. That man was stupid even to have worn the shirt into town. Between the protests in SoDale and Alice Cooper’s article in The Register, her parents were pulling out all the stops when it came to keeping people quiet.

As she pushed through the revolving door, Veronica made a mental note to leak more SoDale information to Alice Cooper, and send Reggie to the Village when she got the chance.

The lobby of the Five Seasons was deserted, and obviously evacuated quite recently. Abandoned cups of coffee steamed eerily on side tables, and coats sat empty on every chair and sofa. It was as if the Rapture happened while Veronica was going through the revolving door. She pulled her hoodie closer around her.

Veronica turned toward the elevators, but caught herself. There was no way they’d leave the elevators running in a lockdown situation like this. She swerved in the opposite direction, and pushed open the door into the stairwell. Standing at the bottom and looking up at the stark grey concentricity of the stairs going up and up and up, Veronica again cursed her neglect of the weekly cardio.

Even so, she took the stairs two at a time until she thought she would vomit, and dropped down to one step at a time. The closer she came to the VIP floor, the more she strained to hear Archie’s voice. But the stairwell was just as suffocatingly silent as the lobby. When she reached the seventh floor and stopped before the door marked “VIP” in big black letters, Veronica pressed her ear against the dark wood of the door, and finally heard the sound she was searching for. On the other side, muffled but more than familiar, she heard Archie.

“Do you think he’ll try another charge?”

Veronica didn’t like the sound of that. The Red Circle must have already engaged with their target, and that meant it would be much harder to get Archie out. His unwavering sense of duty made him a real pain in the ass sometimes.

Veronica pushed in the door handle, and stepped into the hall. At the loud thunk of the heavy fire door swinging open, everyone in the hallway looked up. Veronica counted ten Red Circle officers, dressed in their strange uniforms, long coats and too many pockets. They were lined up against the walls, clutching automatic weapons, all facing down the door at the end of the hall, which hung slightly open, small curls of smoke twisting up and out of the gap between door and frame.

At the head of the group of officers stood Archie. He was the only one not pressed to the wall as if hoping for some faint cover, but he was dressed in the same Red Circle uniform and bore the same sleek black engine of death, the new automatic rifle Dilton Doiley was so proud to have designed.

Hearing a sudden hushed confusion fall over his troops, Archie looked back and saw Veronica. She knew the exact moment he recognized her because his eyes went wide and his eyebrows shot up almost to his hairline. Veronica smiled and waved.

“Hey, Archiekins! Are you done playing Die Hard yet?” Veronica said, and then immediately regretted it when she saw the look on Archie’s face. He got a particular little wrinkle in his forehead when he thought someone wasn’t taking him seriously enough. He left his place at the head of the group, gesturing for the man behind him to take his place, and came down the hall to where Veronica stood. He grabbed her arm, and pulled her into one of the empty hotel rooms. From the papers, phones, and thoroughly marked up floorplans scattered everywhere, Veronica guessed it was serving as the Red Circle’s command center.

“Ronnie! What are you doing here?” Archie said, his voice strained and thin.

“I came to get you, Archie. Not only did my parents totally ignore the fact that we have plans for tonight, they sent you into a live combat zone after I specifically asked them not to. You’re not ready to join the Red Circle, you’ve barely started recovering from Sweetwater.” Veronica reached out to put a hand on his shoulder, but Archie stepped back, and Veronica froze, unsure what she’d done wrong.

Archie’s knuckles were white on the grip of his gun. “Ronnie, I’m fine. I’ve been back in operations for weeks now.”

Veronica stared at him, mouth opening and closing slightly with each sentence she failed to get all the way out. “For weeks? But...you didn’t say anything about it.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, without breaking eye contact. “It’s classified. The Red Circle recruited me when I came back from Sweetwater, and I’m not supposed to share what we do with anyone except your parents.”

Veronica felt dizzier than when Reggie asked if she ever left Riverdale. “You and my parents, you all lied to me for weeks. You let me think you were back to your usual intern duties, trying to get out of the war headspace, and this whole time you’ve been doing secret special ops missions? All my parents’ dirty work?” Veronica turned away, and then whipped back around, wanting to see Archie’s stupid traitorous face, wanting to spit in it. “I told you about all the leaks to Alice, all Betty’s investigations, everything I’ve learned about what happened to Jellybean and Jughead, and you never thought to mention, even once, that you’ve been doing more for my parents than filing papers and making coffee? That you’ve been selling us out?”

Archie finally looked down, and Veronica felt a rush of cruel pride for making him hurt even a fraction of how she did. To the floor Archie said “I couldn’t say anything, Ronnie. Like I said, the work is classified. If you leaked it to Alice, people might get hurt, or die. Mr. Lodge promised that if I put in a good effort here, he’ll help me the guy who shot my dad. I can’t let anything get in the way of that.”

“Not even doing what’s right? Not even resisting my parents, Riverdale’s own petty pair of princely premieres?” Veronica said. She was very close to shouting, and she wondered if the Red Circle officers outside were enjoying the easy eavesdropping. “Do you even remember what your dad said to you before he died?”

“Of course I remember!” Archie was shouting now too, his pale face reddening by the second until it resembled a particularly chiseled and unblemished tomato. “He said that I can’t let this fear run my life! And I won’t, not fear of the truth, not fear of tough choices, and not fear of what you think of me!”

That last phrase hit Veronica like a kick in the chest. She was winded, as if the air was being yanked from her lungs. She couldn’t remember how to breathe it back in. “What do you mean? I think the absolute world of you, Archiekins! You’re the heroic handsome hunk who anchors this whole town with your relatable, everyman experiences.” Veronica tried again to reach for him, and he stepped back. Something inside her was collapsing in on itself, the support structure crumbling into pieces.

“I don’t want to be an everyman, Veronica. I’m not some boring guy who sits in the corner, strumming my stupid guitar and making out with you while everyone else runs around digging up trouble. I’m going to save people. I’m going to protect you and Riverdale so that nothing like what happened to my dad happens again. We’re never going to be able to have a real life together in a town this dangerous. So I have to clean it up, or we’ve got to break up.” Archie said this all in only two breaths, a dam breaking somewhere inside him and letting everything he felt pour out.

Betrayal inundated Veronica’s body, great waves of indignation and sadness crashing against each other on the shore of her consciousness. She might vomit. She might slap Archie. Both sounded equally appealing. “Well, considering the fact that you’ve been lying to me and acting like the star of your very own Lethal Weapon sequel, I think that choice has just been made for you. You can forget about our anniversary plans, though I guess you already did, and you can forget about being my escort to the Officers’ Ball next month. We’re over, Archie!”

Archie stared at her, not producing an expression so much as the complete absence of one, as if his brain and his face hadn’t yet reached an agreement on what they were feeling. Veronica took a great deal of satisfaction in this, until she heard the first shriek from outside the room. She and Archie ran out into the hall, Archie stepping in front of her to play human shield, which Veronica had to admit was gallant.

At the end of the hall stood a young man, another teenager, leaning jauntily against the doorframe. His left foot rested on the head of a Red Circle officer, who screamed and thrashed as the young man slowly shifted his weight that way. He was smiling, not maniacally, but with many bright white teeth, reflecting a long history of orthodonture and a carefully cultivated sort of attractiveness.

Veronica squinted at the young man, struck by something familiar in his artfully tousled hair and round face. He wore a Dilf Morton polo and perfectly pressed khaki slacks, complemented by a pair of dark brown boat shoes, the toe of which appeared only seconds from bursting the hapless Red Circle officer’s skull. This guy was old money, he had to be. And Veronica always knew old money.

“Nick St. Clair?” she said, stepping around Archie, into the young man’s line of sight. He looked up at the sound of her voice, and his smile widened.

“Ronnie!” It was Nick, without a doubt. Veronica would never forget that affectedly accentless tone that they taught in all the best boarding schools, much less the little note of cigarette-infused huskiness Nick threw in.

“What are you doing here, Nick? I thought you were back in New York. I thought my mom banished you after what you tried to pull on Cheryl and me.” Veronica said, taking another step forward, feeling the eyes of all the Red Circle officers on her as they huddled against the wall, all their weapons trained on Nick. Veronica indulged in a momentary fantasy of them opening fire, shredding the sleazeball until he could fit into an eggcup. It was a satisfying thought.

But even through the veil of her imagination, Veronica could feel Archie’s eyes cutting hard into her back. He didn’t think she could get by in a town like Riverdale on her own? Let him see what the flame alchemy gloves could do. That was a perfect two birds, one stone, too, since Nick definitely deserved to roast in Hell for all the crimes against women and against fashion he’d perpetrated during his short stint in Riverdale.

Nick hadn't stopped smiling, and his grin grew wider the closer Veronica came to him. “Oh, New York! There’s so much I’d like to tell you about New York, Ronnie, if we could only get some private time together. You’d be amazed at the state of the place these days. Actually you’d be amazed at the state of just about everywhere these days. There’s so much about the world that’s been hidden from you. It all used to be hidden from me too, until I got this-”

Nick leaned forward to show her something on the back of his left hand, but the shift in his center of gravity proved too much for his hostage, and with an ugly crunch-pop the Red Circle Officer’s skull burst, showering everyone in a five meter radius with bits of brain, bone, and blood. Veronica flinched as something wet hit her cheek.

“Oops!” said Nick, stepping away from the newly headless corpse, and furiously rubbing his shoe against the floor, apparently not concerned with the spray of gore that now adorned his pants up to the thigh. Satisfied with the spotlessness of his sole after a few scrapes along the carpet, Nick lifted his left hand to Veronica once again, showing her a strange tattoo. It had definitely not been there during his ridiculous spree over the summer.

The tattoo was a dark maroon red, and it stood out harshly against Nick’s skin. The tattoo was a sort of a six pointed star enclosed by a circle. The circle was strange in and of itself, not just a geometric shape, but a winged serpent, toothy jaws clamped tight on its own tail. Veronica had no idea what the symbol meant, and wondered if it were some kind of ultra-specialized transmutation circle.

“As I was saying,” Nick continued. “There were so much I didn’t know before I got this. But now, now I see it all, even if He doesn’t want me to.”

Veronica opened her mouth to ask “Who’s He?”, sensing the capital letter inflection Nick was putting on this mysterious He, but she was cut off by the pop-pop-pop of an assault rifle firing. She felt the icy chill of passing death as the bullets whizzed past her head and found their target in Nick’s hand, chest, and face. Veronica preemptively winced, expecting a splatter like the burst-grape skull of the Red Circle officer, but felt nothing. She watched with mounting nausea as Nick reached up with his right hand and plucked a bullet from the wound in his head. The bullet hole was oddly dry, as if Nick’s blood were delayed in pouring forth, leaving his torn flesh to hang loose and lifeless while the rest of him went on, lively as ever. Inside his skull there appeared to be nothing but red tissue paper.

But even as Veronica thought this, the tendrils of viscera hanging from the edges of Nick’s newly open-plan skull snapped to life with a perverse energy, knitting themselves together with arcs of alchemical electricity, animating shreds of skin which spackled over the hole like with an undulation uncomfortably like a tangle of worms.

Nick stood up straight, cracked his neck with a quick side-to-side twitch, and then snorted deeply, as if testing out the connectivity of his newly repaired sinus. He looked at Archie with a twisted expression, an amused annoyance. “Shoot first, ask questions later? Is that what they teach you kids these days?”

“I didn’t ask you anything, St. Clair. I don’t have any questions for a someone like you,” said Archie, leveling his gun, ready to fire again.

Veronica stepped into the line of fire, and, glancing back at Archie, felt a rush of satisfaction at the way his shoulders slumped and his gun dropped. “Nick, help me out here, because I’m a little confused. When did your life go from a bad episode of Gossip Girl to a bad episode of The Magicians?” she said, one hand outstretched to quell Archie, the other waving to Nick, trying to pull the story from him.

“Ronnie, quick as ever with the reference,” said Nick, laughing. “I miss TV, don’t you? It’s funny how there have been no new shows since 2018, isn’t it? A whole industry just up and turned to dust, do you think?”

“It is 2018, Nick,” said Veronica, deciding that if he didn’t say something useful in the next minute, she would step aside and let Archie do his thing. “Or have you been getting high on your own supply lately? I hear roofies aren’t good for the memory.”

“When was the last time you saw a calendar, Ronnie?” Nick asked, drawing closer and prompting a symphony of clicks as the Red Circle officers readied their weapons.

“That’s about as relevant as the last time I saw a Big Mac, as far as this conversation goes, Nick,” Veronica replied, taking an equivalent step back. She could hear Archie breathing hard behind her. She recognized the sound. He was panicking, each breath shallow and close behind the one before. If Veronica didn’t resolve this quickly and cleanly, she suspected it would be quite messy instead. “What were you saying about your tattoo, Nick? I’m sure it’s not just the product of a particularly wild Manhattan bender. It’s a little flashy, even for you.”

Nick held his hand out in front of him, flexing his fingers and admiring the ripple of the tattoo across his shifting sinews. “No, it wasn’t exactly part of the plan. But there are trade-offs in any great deal. I think this is a net profit,” he said absently, watching his skin stretch and tighten. When he finally looked up at her, his eyes were hazy and unfocused. He’s still thinking about his hand somewhere back in his brain, Veronica guessed, oddly disturbed by the idea.

Nick stepped toward her, and grimaced as his foot slid forward on a bit of viscera-moistened skull. He looked down at the smear on his shoe, and then up to Veronica, and his expression was now terrifyingly conscious, as if he had abruptly come awake. “You know, human beings are so easy to kill. You just saw what happened to that poor man on the floor. I always used to worry about that. You know, would I die too soon? Would I miss all the life I deserved? I wanted to clutch every moment to my chest, tear everything I desired out of the world. And now?”

Nick was still advancing and Veronica was still retreating, her eyes glued to his. She could feel herself drawing close to Archie, though, his nervous breathing growing louder and louder with each step. She wondered how long before she was out of his line of fire. It might perhaps be best to let him take his shot at Nick as soon as possible.

“And now what?” Veronica asked, letting the arm she extended toward Archie slowly fall towards her pocket, grabbing hold of the flame alchemy gloves. “Are you saying you’re not human anymore? Just because you’ve whipped up some Wolverine-type cure for bullet wounds?”

“I do enjoy talking to you, Ronnie. More than anyone else I know, you are just a font of wit,” said Nick, taking another two steps in quick succession, drawing closer than ever. “I’m not human anymore. I’m not anything like I was, at least physically. Mentally, though, maybe I’m just more myself than ever. I never did feel much else besides Greed.” Nick dropped into a crouch, and leapt for her. Veronica realized what was happening with only seconds to spare. She let herself fall back, below Archie’s radius of fire, and hoped that for once he’d do the smart thing.

She underestimated him. As soon as Veronica was out of the way, Archie lifted his gun and fired. The Red Circle officers on either side of him took this as a signal, and let off a hail of bullets like Archie’s another ten times over. The damp thud of scores of bullets impacting a body was drowned out by the overwhelming ratatat of so many guns firing at once.

Veronica didn’t bother to watch Nick get torn to shreds. She flipped over, crawling on her hands and knees farther down the hall, sizing up her escape routes. If she and Archie were really broken up now, would he sell her out to her parents? Was it worth trying to get home before anyone noticed?

Behind her, Veronica heard a howl, and wondered at Nick’s ability to survive that hail of bullets. He really had toughened up since last she’d seen him. She, Josie, and Cheryl defeated him easily, one blow from a champagne bottle and a few kicks while he was down, and that was that. It wasn’t like him to shrug off a direct headshot from an assault rifle. In her experience, it wasn’t like anyone.

Veronica was about to stand and flee through the fire door when she felt something bounce off her back. It was large and round and oddly padded, making Veronica think of all the times she’d been a bystander casualty of middle school basketball games. Veronica looked down to where the object lay, curious as to what it was, and a little irrationally afraid it was a grenade or something else equally deadly.

It was a head, the head of a Red Circle officer. He stared up at her with blank eyes and a slack, open mouth. Veronica strangled a scream that was already halfway out her mouth. What would screaming accomplish right now? Instead, she forced herself, by degrees, to turn and look at the confrontation she had left behind.

Nick stood in the midst of the Red Circle officers ought to have been. He was bathed in blood, but beneath that something else also coated his skin, leaving it coal black and smooth. Huge tusks curved forth from his mouth, which was now a lipless, toothy puncture in his face. The rest of his facial features were gone, except his small eyes, which peered out at the remaining soldiers, still starving for blood.

Veronica saw with incredible relief that Archie was still a few meters away from Nick, along with the last two surviving Red Circle officers crouched in Archie’s shadow. They were desperately reloading their guns, while Archie continued firing directly into Nick’s chest. The bullets pinged off in all directions, tearing into the walls, ceiling, floor, and corpses around Nick.

Nick took a step towards Archie, bullets still sparking off his chest. “That’s a real waste of resources, Archie,” said Nick, reaching out and snapping a bullet from the air like it was a mosquito. “Out in the real world they’d pay for every single one of those bullets in blood and bread a hundred times over. You have no idea what kind of world it is outside Riverdale, kid. They’d eat you for breakfast.” He flicked the bullet towards Archie, and Archie flinched as it whizzed past him.

Veronica watched as Archie dropped his spent rifle and went for the knife at his belt, lunging at Nick, bright blade headed straight for his throat. Nick caught Archie by the shirt and tossed him casually aside. Archie landed with a thump a few meters from Veronica. She heard the breath burst out of him in a painful gasp.

Nick’s shadow fell across the two Red Circle officers, who could no longer even shoot for the risk of ricochets. They quaked before him, on their knees, their hands slack at their sides. One wept openly. Veronica had never seen a Red Circle officer give up before. It was like watching her father cry, the incongruity pressing against assumptions so deeply ingrained she’d never even realized she held them.

Nick looked between the two officers, one finger on his right hand bouncing rhythmically left to right in the air as he muttered to himself. Veronica had a sinking feeling that she recognized this behavior from any number of deranged TV villains. She looked at the flame alchemy gloves still clutched in her fist. She wasn’t an alchemical prodigy. But neither was Reggie, and he’d got the hang of it real fast. She slid the right one on just as Nick finished his count with a triumphant pronouncement of “Moe!” upon the soldier on the left.

Reaching for the officer’s throat, Nick hesitated just as his fingertips brushed skin, turning away from his prey, feeling eyes on him. Veronica stood facing Nick, right arm outstretched before her. Her thumb and forefinger were poised in the moment before a snap. “Let them go, Nicky,” said Veronica, gesturing with her other hand for the two officers to move out of the way.

“White gloves, Ronnie?” said Nick, skepticism writ large across his face. Playing Mickey Mouse these days? A little lowbrow for you, I would think.”

Veronica ignored him, concentrating on working the alchemy. On the back of her hand, the transmutation circle embroidered on the glove thrummed with heat and energy, awake to her. Veronica pushed her thoughts through the circle and into the air between her and Nick, peeling apart molecules of air as she went, filling the space between them with pure oxygen. She congratulated herself on remembering how to draw energy from the broken bonds of the molecules. Veronica had to exchange something for the transmutation, and she didn’t have all that much energy of her own to spare.

“Ground control to Major Lodge!” said Nick, snapping his fingers the same way he did when he thought the service in a restaurant was too slow. Veronica watched the two Red Circle officers slink away from Nick, down the hall, behind her, and out of sight. She smiled to Nick as he glared back, demanding “What have you got there? What’s so funny?”

“You’ll see,” Veronica said, and snapped her fingers, enjoying the catch and pull of the rough material as her thumb and index fingers slid against each other. She imagined she could sense the birth of the spark, the moment it touched the pure oxygen at her fingertips, and went shooting down the path she’d built, the one that ended in Nick’s chest.

Veronica heard the snap, and then all other sound was obliterated by the roar of flames. They roiled forth from her hand and engulfed Nick. He screamed and this time Veronica could be sure it was Nick who was suffering. Through the flame-tossed chaos around him, Veronica caught a glimpse of Nick’s face, his protective coating burnt away, and then his normal skin as well, exposed muscle blistering in the heat. Veronica stepped back without thinking about it, the sight of his eyeballs cooked and egg-white much more real than her fantasies.

“How did you do that?” she heard Archie say, somewhere close behind her. It was hard to think about anything except the pillar of flame consuming Nick. It outshone everything.

“I’ve got a few tricks at the ends of my sleeves,” said Veronica, waving her gloved hand in the general direction of Archie. She felt him try to catch her hand, take the glove, and she yanked it away. “These were a gift, Archie. Please ask first.”

Archie moved to stand beside her, watching the flames collapse inward as they tore through all the fuel around them, leaving Nick a smoldering heap on the floor. Archie rested his hand gently on Veronica’s arm. “I didn’t mean to overstep, Ronnie. But flame alchemy is really dangerous. I’m pretty sure those are from RDPD. They’re locked up for a reason.”

Veronica nodded. “Yeah, because my parents are afraid of what somebody might do with them. Destabilize the regime, maybe.”

Archie opened his mouth to reply, eyebrows already knit, but stopped, pointing to the featureless, broiled wretch on the ground before them. Nick was stirring, his body already ringed with the same blue sparks that had stitched up his face before. He opened one eye, aqueous once more, and stared up at Veronica. In a voice scorched raw, he said “That hurt.”

Veronica stared down at Nick. “What are you, Nick? What happened to you?”

Nick’s one eye rolled in its socket, and Veronica couldn’t tell whether it was out of exasperation or agony. “I tried to tell you. I wasn’t good enough to be a sacrifice, so they hauled me in, experimented on me. I didn’t understand anything until they made me swallow the stone. But the stone is everything. You can hear them all, you know. Everyone in there, as long as they last.” As he said this, Nick tapped weakly on his chest, just where his heart ought to be. Archie followed Nick’s movement, and then knelt beside him, brandishing his blade above Nick’s papery, ashen flesh. Veronica grabbed Archie’s wrist, and he recoiled at the strange rough texture of her gloves.

“What the hell are you doing? He’s barely got skin, I don’t think he needs a killing blow!” said Veronica, although she could see that whatever power kept Nick alive was hard at work now, slowly re-covering him, feet first, with new scrubbed pink flesh.

“This is our mission! We were supposed to subdue Nick and remove the stone from his body. I have to do this. My men died for this,” Archie said, plunging the blade into the space just beneath Nick’s sternum. Nick convulsed at the assault, but without force. His one open eye slid back under a slowly regenerating eyelid as he passed out. Archie cut with focus and precision until Veronica shoved him hard.

“Stop it, Archie! He’s down!” she said, trying to tear the knife from his grasp.

Archie pushed her away and lengthened the incision, now wide but oddly bloodless, just as his face had been. Nick’s body seemed to be made of clay, dull, soft, and homogenous. Through the gape in Nick’s chest cavity, Veronica saw not organs, blood, and bone, but a bright red gemstone, set in a twisting nest of flesh. The stone pulsed with a deep red light.

“Now’s a weird time to show sympathy for a serial rapist and murderer. Especially since you’re the one who blew his skin off,” Archie said, hand poised over the stone, hesitating to plunge his arm into Nick’s body.

“Archie!” said Veronica, fists clenched at her sides. “This isn’t smart! Do you even know what that stone in there is? I don’t, and I don’t feel great about just handing it over to my parents because they’re nice to you!”

Archie dropped his knife and stood to face her, hands out before him, begging. “Your parents are the only people who care about protecting Riverdale! They might have harsh methods, but they’re doing something to stop the chaos. You weren’t at Sweetwater, Veronica, you don’t know what it’s like outside of Riverdale! This is our home, and we have to keep it safe from everything and everyone who wants to destroy it. So I don’t care what that stone is, as long as it puts Nick out of commission and keeps you and Riverdale safe.”

Veronica stared at him. This was the most open Archie had been since coming back from Sweetwater, and she felt a pang of guilt that she wasn’t happier to hear from him. “My parents are evil, Archie. They keep people locked up in SoDale Village, you know that, right? Like a prison camp? And they tossed Chuck Clayton in prison for protesting the school cancellations. And they let Sheriff Minetta execute all those Serpents right on Main Street. Have you forgotten all of that?”

“No,” Archie said, shifting his gaze away momentarily, like he couldn’t bear to look at her. “But have you forgotten about Betty’s dad? And Cheryl’s? Jason’s dead. All those people who disappeared, everyone who Mr. Cooper killed, everyone who died at Sweetwater. At least your parents keep things under control. At least they keep people safe. I have to help.”

Veronica almost screamed at him, the heat of her frustration turning the edges of her vision red. Before she could stop herself, she let the fatal words slip out. “This won’t bring your dad back! Nothing will!”

The hurt on Archie’s face was more forceful than a gutpunch, and Veronica felt just as sick after it. She tried to speak, to apologize, to say something that would make it right. But there really was nothing more to say.

“Have the two of you tried couples’ counseling?” said Nick, who, Veronica now realized, had managed to stand, looking from her to Archie and back with a sad smile. The blue alchemical energy still haloed him, but he had skin again and two eyes. The smell of burnt hair and cooked flesh lingered in the hallway, though.

Veronica raised her hand to torch him again, but quicker than thought Nick’s hand closed around her fingers, preventing her from snapping. Archie lunged at Nick, and choked as Nick caught him around the throat with his other hand. Nick held them at bay, watching Archie redden and strain for breath, and Veronica struggle to get the left glove on with her one free hand, yanking against his grip fruitlessly.

“How should I kill you?” Nick asked them seriously, looking from one to the other as if hoping for genuine suggestions. “I’ve done a lot of dismembering today already, and that seems a little impersonal for the two of you. You’re stars, after all. Half of the Core Four, right here in my hands. Maybe-”

Nick stopped short, and at first Veronica expected him to throw up. His eyes went wide and his lips white, and she felt his grip on her hand slacken. Veronica pulled away, watching as a long silver blade blossomed from Nick’s adam’s apple, extending far enough that he himself could see it below his chin.

As Archie tore himself free from Nick’s hold, Veronica realized the hall behind Nick was filling quickly with RDPD officers. Nick collapsed, head flopping from side to side and the rest of his body limp, spine severed by the saber in his neck. Veronica’s mother stood behind him, arm still outstretched where she’d released the blade’s grip. “Veronica. I had a feeling I’d find you here. You ought to have at least made a decoy in your bed or something. It was sloppy work,” Hermoine said, her tone flat and cool.

From the crowd of police officers emerged Hiram, who glanced at Nick’s body and then joined Hermione in watching Veronica disapprovingly. “I hope you’ve learned your lesson about sneaking out now. It’s a dangerous world outside Pembrooke House. You’re lucky Archie was here.”

“Archie was about as useful as Mrs. Doubtfire in a firefight,” Veronica snapped. “I had Nick under control. He had a lot of interesting things to say, too. I was wondering if you’d care to give a statement on any of them.”

Hermione waved to the officers behind them, gesturing for them to collect Nick’s limp body. “I don’t have any particular need to comment on this man’s ridiculous conspiracy theories. There will always be people who don’t understand or appreciate Riverdale. We know how to deal with them.” As Hermione said this, four cops knelt at her feet, trying to gather Nick up, and Veronica had a sudden vision of them as cherubs around the feet of a saint. Fuhrer Hermione Lodge, patron saint of dirty politics and neo-fascist city management.

Veronica backed away from her parents, tense. Whatever she’d had going with them before, spying and living undercover and enjoying life as the First Daughter, it was over now. Nick hadn’t quite told her any one complete thing, but if there was anyone in town who could piece together fragments into a clear, coherent whole, it was Betty and Jughead. So that was where she needed to go next.

Hiram opened his mouth, about to speak, and Veronica knew he knew she would run, that he was about to call for the cops to collect her, for Archie to restrain her. Without hesitation, Veronica pulled on her left glove and lifted both her hands before her. The two simultaneous snaps hung in the air for only a second before they were consumed by the ball of fire that burst into being between Veronica and her parents. Even as she tore down the hall toward the emergency exit, Veronica hoped that she’d calculated right, that the fireball was just large enough to startle them, not quite large enough to hurt them. But fire wasn’t really an exact science, and Veronica couldn’t stop herself from looking back once. Black smoke filled the air, and she could hear her parents coughing and sputtering, the RDPD officers asking if they were alright, trying to hustle them away.

Through a break in the smoke, Veronica saw, just for a moment, Archie’s face, mottled with ash. He wasn’t burnt, but when his eyes met hers, Veronica saw a blank look of betrayal, so dull and sad and somehow lifeless, that she felt sick, and looked away, pushing through the door and down the stairs two at a time.

At the fifth floor Veronica dodged through the fire door for just a moment, igniting the walls, the thick carpet, watching the flames lick the tin ceiling. That would slow the cops down for a minute or two, especially when the stairwell went up too. She was glad the building had already been evacuated.

So long, Five Seasons, thought Veronica. So long, Pembrooke House. So long, Mom and Daddy and Archie.

Hello, resistance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two updates next month, since one is really short! Expect Archie activity followed by Toni time. In short, get hyped.
> 
> Update one: 4/5/2019
> 
> Update two: 4/26/2019


	3. Let This Fear Run Your Life Arch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Archie talks some things through with the boss, and, because he's Archie, he makes the wrong choice.

The Five Seasons proved shockingly flammable, and within an hour of Veronica’s personal blaze of glory, the hotel was a terrifying conflagration, bathing downtown Riverdale in an orange haze and a shower of ash. Archie and Mr. Lodge stood at the end of the block, just outside the radius of unbearable heat, and watched the hotel burn.

“Veronica really knows how to leave a mark, doesn’t she?” said Mr. Lodge, already nodding to himself as if he’d pronounced a profound philosophical truism.

“With all due respect, sir,” said Archie, “I think she may be more than you bargained for.”

Mr. Lodge laughed, and Archie watched the play of warm light and deep shadow over the older man’s face.  When the fire flickered just right, Mr. Lodge’s face looked like a skull, his eye sockets diffuse black voids. “I heard someone say once that we all get the children we deserve, and I’m not sure they were wrong. But I’ll make sure Veronica gets back in line soon enough. We’ve invested too much in her for her to exceed our grasp.” Mr. Lodge looked over at Archie and caught him staring. He smiled and now the firelight played over his glossy white teeth. “There’s only one place she could go now, don’t you think?”

“I guess she’d have to go to the Serpents, sir. But they’re not really a threat, are they? Couldn’t we just do a prisoner swap with them?” said Archie, thinking of Jughead and Betty, how often he’d seen them around town together in Serpents gear, daring the Red Circle to arrest them. Archie’d never been brave enough to approach, not even once. Every time he thought about it, Archie saw the faces of all the Serpents he’d helped the Red Circle arrest, clearer than they’d ever been in real life.

“Concerned for your friends, Archie?” said Mr. Lodge. “You’ve probably wondered why we didn’t pick up Ms. Cooper and Mr. Jones before when they constantly publish seditious material in that rag paper of theirs. Partially, I admit, it was because I knew how hard it would be on you. No matter how many times they disappoint you, you’ve always stuck by Betty and Jughead.”

Archie shrugged, frowning, not able to look at the fire or Mr. Lodge anymore. He stared into the darkness around them instead. “That’s not exactly true. Betty and I had a big fight last year. She wanted to investigate you and Fuhrer Lodge more. I guess I didn’t see too much of her after that. I got really busy working for you then.”

Mr. Lodge laid a hand gently on Archie’s shoulder. The gesture was comforting, but Mr. Lodge’s hand was strangely cold and heavy, like it belonged to a marble statue. “Well, yes, and I’m not afraid to say that we encouraged that, Archie. We gave you more assignments, and created distractions for Ms. Cooper’s other friends too. It was to our advantage to isolate her a bit. She’s a dissenter, and everything she’s done since then has only proved that.” Mr. Lodge reached out to no one, and an aide appeared with a folder, passing it to Mr. Lodge reverently and then scuttling out of sight.

Mr, Lodge held the folder out to Archie, allowing it to fall open, revealing its contents. The first item in the folder was a large glossy photo of Betty, Jughead, and Jellybean sitting on a log in the woods to the west of Riverdale. Jellybean towered over the other two even sitting, her huge metal hands perched daintily on her knees in a painfully childlike pose.

“As you can see,” Mr. Lodge said, “we’ve benefitted from letting Jughead and Betty move freely around town. They’ve taught us exactly what they think is important and where. Thanks to that dynamic duo, we know where the Serpents are camped right now, and we can collect them, as well as Veronica, whenever we deem it convenient.”

Archie took the folder and flipped through it. The pictures were surprisingly mundane, just Betty, Jughead, Jellybean, and various Serpents going about their daily business. Betty and Jughead interviewing people, working in the office of the Blue & Gold. Jughead and Jellybean practicing alchemy in the woods, transmuting rocks until they got bored and silly, filling the woods with rocks reforged into Yogi Bear and Batman. Jellybean and Betty fixing up an old truck, the pictures taken over a series of weeks, the truck going from a jalopy to almost new like reading a flipbook, every picture adding on a new bright bit or a fresh coat of paint.

“This doesn’t really seem like evidence of sedition, Mr. Lodge,” said Archie. “They’re just doing what they always do. Betty and Jughead look for trouble. If it wasn’t with you and the Fuhrer, it would be with someone.”

“Of course,” said Mr. Lodge, taking back the folder and waving it gently at no one until his aide reappeared from nowhere to collect it. “But it is with me. And so it’s a problem. I have to show Betty, Jughead, and Veronica where the limits are.” He gripped Archie’s shoulder until Archie swore his bones were buckling. “How are you feeling, Archie? Be honest. Veronica breaking up with you, then fleeing the scene. Betty and Jughead traitors. You’ve lost a lot the last few years, Archie. Went to war. Came back without your father. It takes a toll.”

Archie searched himself, looking for the pain Mr. Lodge was seeking, but the search was like plunging a hand into icy water: he hurt unbearably at first, and then went completely numb. Archie was dull inside, and the rollercoaster wild events of Riverdale were impossibly distant from any vulnerable place in his heart.

“I don’t know, Mr. Lodge. I guess I don’t feel much of anything right now. When it piles up this high, it’s just too much to think about. Maybe it’ll hit me later.” Archie watched the fire again, wondering what it would be like to overflow with heat and light in unbearable excess.

“That’s our tough boy,” said Mr. Lodge, but he said it without conviction, his voice tight with strangled tension, forcing him to pause after speaking. When he finally went on, his voice was flooded with cool confidence again. “Archie, it’s high time you made your bones. You’ve done great work for us, and you’ve got a big future in this organization.” Mr. Lodge turned away from the wreckage of the Five Seasons, and waved for Archie to follow him out of the bright swath of light. “Now that we’ve captured Nick St. Clair, I have a very special assignment for you, something that’s going to change everything for you, and for Riverdale too, I hope.”

Archie hesitated at the edge of the shadows, oppressed by the geography of the situation, the heaviness of into the darkness that always rested so very heavily around Mr. Lodge. Archie looked back at the Five Seasons, and thought of his dad.  _ You can’t let this fear run your life _ , he’d said.  _ You can’t let this fear run your life _ .

Archie passed out of the light, following Mr. Lodge. As he moved into the darkness, Archie felt the shadows grow unexpectedly warm and humid, as if he were being swallowed. The Five Seasons burned for hours more, and no one stayed to watch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next update: 4/26/2019


	4. In Unity There Is Strength

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Toni Topaz scrambles to manage the Serpents in the wake of Betty, Jughead, and Veronica's various rampages across Riverdale.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is brought to you by the letter T, which is still for thesis (again why this chapter is late), but also for Toni Topaz.

Toni Topaz drew her transmutation circle fluidly: a square in a circle, and then an equilateral triangle inside the square. She’d drawn this circle so many times she could finish it without looking, which was handy in her darkroom. Toni held the paper in place with one hand while she joined the last pair of lines, and then stood back from her work, peering through the gloom, waiting for the glow-in-the-dark pencil Jughead had whipped up for her to kick in.

The transmutation circle faded into view with a soft greenish glow. It was exactly as she’d seen it in her head. Toni smiled and reached into the tub behind, pulling out a reel of film dripping with a chemical rinse. She set the reel on the circle, and pressed her hands to the paper on either side of the circle. Blue light sprang up from her pencilled lines, and Toni felt the rush of energy passing out of her body and into the reaction. The liquid on the film atomized with a whoosh, repelled as if the film and the rinse were matched magnetic poles.

Drying her hands on her pants, Toni grabbed her film and flicked on the light in the darkroom, the sudden fluorescent brightness leaving her a little dizzy. The darkroom wasn’t really much of a darkroom. It had begun its life as the women’s showers at Grizzly State Park, but now, with Grizzly Park serving as the South Side Serpents’ home-away-from-Riverdale, Toni was learning to make do with more limited resources. She’d put cardboard over the small window, dragged in two picnic tables with the help of Fangs and Sweet Pea, and set to work developing and printing, mostly for Betty and Jughead’s quote-unquote “school paper”, which read most often like a centuries-displaced issue of the Chicago  _ Arbeiter-Zeitung _ .

Toni slid down onto the picnic bench, and began to cut the film, sliding each small rectangle into one of three labelled plastic sleeves: “Angry Stuff”, “Sad Stuff”, and “Cheryl”. Pictures of a riot on South Side, the police and Red Circle cracking skulls left and right, went into “Angry Stuff”. Pictures of a scarred up sixteen year old, already bent beyond their years by Sweetwater, went into “Sad Stuff”. Cheryl went into “Cheryl”.

Toni took these last pictures only intermittently, when she could get up to the far North Side and see Cheryl, doing time currently alongside Chuck Clayton and any number of their other former classmates in the North Side Probationary Academy. All Toni’s recent Cheryl pictures were mediated by the chainlink fence that separated them, their conversations cut short whenever Cheryl thought she heard the guards drawing near. It hurt to be so close and so completely apart at the same time, two parallel realities crushed together in one painful knot. At the fence she could feel Cheryl’s fingers against hers, reach through and touch Cheryl’s face, even kiss her if they pressed themselves against the fence and ignored the humiliation. But she couldn’t hold onto Cheryl, crush her close, or feel the comfort of their two bodies together. She couldn’t sleep in the same bed with Cheryl, or eat breakfast together, or show Cheryl the pictures that made Toni feel like a real artist, however briefly. The Cheryl-less-ness of Toni’s daily life pressed down on her all the time.

Not that Toni wasn’t also hard at work figuring out exactly how to rescue Cheryl. But resources were tight for the Serpents, and calling Cheryl’s current location the North Side “Probationary Academy” didn’t make it any less a thoroughly secured prison.

So for now Toni went to the fence once a week, when the “students” were out in the yard, and Cheryl came to her, and they talked, Toni taking a few pictures here and there. She was trying to catch the exact moment when Cheryl’s Cheryl shone through most vibrantly, rendering her spectacularly elegant, dull grey uniform and everything. She was trying to find out exactly how Cheryl did that, besides her sheer fabulosity.

But the rest of the week belonged to Serpent work, and showing up wherever she heard there would be trouble and capture it. It was strangely dull work, chasing violence. Toni had it routinized down to the minute. She found the latest riot or execution or whatever and watched it all go bad. She took the pictures. She dodged the cops who’d grab for her camera. Then she’d develop the pictures, lay them out in the Blue & Gold, and watch nothing change. Sometimes the whole stock of papers was confiscated before the Serpents could deliver it. Sometimes it seemed just like no one noticed at all, that the people of Riverdale were worn down to senseless nubs, dull to the violence unfurling right out on the front lawn. That was worse than when the papers went straight onto the bonfire.

Toni finished separating the reel and sorting her negatives, and, taping the plastic sleeves shut, she slid them into a filing cabinet, one of the many appropriated by the Serpents when South Side Academy first shut down. She switched off the light and left the darkroom, a little disappointed to find that it was not much brighter outside, the sun already sunk past the treetops.

Toni wandered towards the center of camp, wondering if tonight was a real dinner night or a can of beans night. Saturdays were usually a real dinner night, unless the supply chain completely fell through. It was possible there wouldn’t be anything to eat tonight at all. Every mission in the last two weeks had gone so wrong, she was pretty sure that their undercovers couldn’t get groceries without being unmasked and hauled off to a black site.

Toni paused on her meander towards the mess tent, seeing Fangs and Sweet Pea perched on a picnic table, deep in conversation. Fangs always knew what dinner would be. Toni recalculated her destination and veered towards her friends.

Fangs and Sweet Pea looked up as she approached, and Sweet Pea waved. “Hey, Toni. How’s it going?” he said, pointing to a spot on the bench beside him.

Toni sat down next to Sweet Pea and nodded to Fangs, who asked if she’d gotten any really stellar shots during the week.

Toni shook her head, and said “No. Same old, same old. Cops and Red Circle beating down on some protestors out of SoDale. Portraits from an interview Betty did with a Sweetwater veteran. You know Riverdale: it’s never the best of times, always the worst of times.”

Fangs leaned back against the picnic table, elbows resting on the tabletop. He stared up at the few stars fading into view above the trees. “To tell you the truth, I haven’t been to Riverdale in a month, maybe more. Jug’s got me and SP patrolling most days.”

“Don’t know why we’re still calling ourselves the South Side Serpents. We’ve been on this camping trip for so long, might as well call us the Wood Side Serpents,” said Sweet Pea, resting his chin on his hand, watching darkness gather at the corners of the camp.

“D.B. Woodside,” said Fangs quietly.

Sweet Pea raised an eyebrow. “Alfre Woodard?”

“Wood Harris,” replied Fangs, nodding.

Toni stared at them. “Is this what passes for conversation between you two these days?”

“Guard duty is really boring, Toni. We’re kind of out of conversational juice,” Sweet Pea said. “We’ve been through two hundred and eighteen rounds of Would You Rather this week.”

“You know that he would rather have a lifetime of free coffee than free wifi?” said Fangs, his voice low with scandal.

“What would be the point of free wifi out here?” Sweet Pea said, turning to glare at Fangs. “We can’t even get cell service in this dump.”

“How long have we been up here, really, guys?” asked Toni. “Two months? Three?”

“Ever since Fuhrer Lodge made Serpents membership illegal, I guess,” said Sweet Pea, Fangs nodding along. “So a couple months, sure.”

“And all that time Jughead and Jellybean have been going back and forth from here and Riverdale, bringing Betty half the time too, and the Red Circle still hasn’t picked us up. Do you really think they don’t know where we are?” Toni said, a thought taking shape behind her eyes. A very worrying thought.

“I guess they must not,” Fangs said. “It’s not like they need a warrant anymore or anything like that.”

But Sweet Pea understood. He was watching Toni, a slight crease forming across his forehead. “You’re saying they know where we are, they’re just waiting for a good time?”

“Or it’s better for them to let us go free. When was the last time we pulled a mission off without a single thing going wrong? Without losing a single Serpent?”

Fangs looked from Toni to Sweet Pea and back again, his mouth bunched into a tight and nervous squiggle. “What’s that supposed to mean? Every day we’re figuring out how to knock the regime down, what do they have to gain from letting us hit them over and over?”

“It means,” said Toni, realizing now the actual implications of what she was thinking. “It means there’s a spy in our camp. It means Fuhrer Lodge has been playing us this whole time.” Toni stood up, her whole body shot through with lines of ice. “Is Jug here? Have you seen him today?”

“Last time I saw him, he was headed into town,” said Fangs, also standing, Sweet Pea alongside him. “He said he had to meet Betty for some Blue & Gold thing.”

“Dammit,” Toni said, pressing her knuckles to her temples, trying to squeeze a good idea out of her brain. “Okay. That’s just like him, isn’t it? When was the last time he actually spent the whole day at camp, caught up with any of us?”

Fangs looked at Sweet Pea. Sweet Pea looked at Fangs. They both shrugged.

“We need to make a plan, so we can present it to Jug when we get back. We have to draw out the spy, and we have to move camp. As long as they know where we are, they can always sweep us if we have to. And if the Serpents go under…” said Toni, feeling her heart being crushed in a vise. She knew a thing or two about the life of a political prisoner under the Lodges. Cheryl had it bad as a regular prisoner, but the things she said they’d done to Midge or Chuck…

“If the Serpents go under,” said Sweet Pea, and Fangs finished the thought: “Then Riverdale goes under, once and for all.”

Toni took a deep breath, and gathered all her disparate parts, scattered by panic, back into one focused point. “We need to make a plan. We need somewhere to go, regroup, and figure out who’s selling us out. Jughead’s got all the maps in his tent, right?”

“Last I saw of them, sure,” said Sweet Pea.

Toni was already on her way by the time Sweet Pea finished his sentence, and Fangs and Sweet Pea sprinted to catch up with her. “You sure this is an emergency, Toni? If they’re not going to roll us up today or tomorrow anyway, then can’t we wait for Jug?” said Fangs.

“Every day that we wait is another day they know more about us, and another day we get more dug in here!” said Toni. “If we have a plan when Jughead gets back, at least there’s a chance he’ll hear us out, if he’s not busy mooning over some Betty project or Jellybean brooding.” The faster Toni walked, the angrier she got. They’d been at this campsite for too long, and she knew it, she’d known it more than a month ago, and every time she went to ask Jughead what the plan was, he’d said they needed to stay close to Riverdale, that farther out would weaken them and put them too close to Greendale’s territory. Or worse, he just wasn’t around.

The main part of camp was fairly quiet, anyone not on patrol sitting around in their tents. There was a running joke around camp that since their banishment the Serpents had seen the most casualties because of disagreements over games of Go Fish gone wrong. That wasn’t true, but it was nice to have the joke. Every single mission they ran, whether it was black market trade, intel ops on the Red Circle, or just a grocery trip, they lost somebody one way or the other. The Serpents now inhabited only six total tents, along with Jughead’s own, the med tent, and the mess tent. The Lodges were waging a war of attrition, and the Serpents were losing.

In Jughead’s tent, Toni dug through three or four stacks of books and mounds of burger wrappers before she found the map of Riverdale and the surrounding area. Spreading the map flat on a table Fangs and Sweet Pea had cleared, Toni gestured for a pen, pencil, something. Sweet Pea came up with a green glitter gel pen.

“It’s the one Jughead used to sign the new Serpent Charter,” he said, handing it to her.

Toni turned the pen over in her hands, flicking it back and forth to agitate the ink. “I always wondered how he got that cool shimmery effect. I figured it was alchemy.”

“Nope. Just good old fashioned ingenuity by the Bic company,” said Fangs proudly.

Toni popped the cap off, letting it bounce across the table and onto the floor, disappearing into the clutter that was Jughead’s life. She circled the location of the Serpents’ camp on the map, and then scanned the area around it. Fangs and Sweet Pea leaned over her shoulders, watching her work.

“We need somewhere not too far away,” said Fangs. “Jughead’s not wrong about being able to get to Riverdale.”

“Yeah, this isn’t a retreat,” said Sweet Pea, and then went on, hesitantly, “It isn’t a retreat, right?”

“I hope not,” said Toni. “But if they corner us up here, we’ll be lucky to get the chance to retreat at all.”

“What about there?” Fangs was pointing to a spot to the north of Riverdale, marked with a little tent icon and the title “Swell Springs Site”. “I think I remember going up there once or twice when I was a kid. It’s a campsite like this.”

“Not exactly like this,” said Sweet Pea. “I don’t remember plumbing or anything like that.”

Toni sighed. “We’ve gotten used to a lot, we’ll get used to that too, I guess.”

“Extra motivation for the revolution, you know?” said Fangs.

Toni circled Swell Springs, and then kept scanning. There wasn’t much to be said for the rest of the Riverdale area. They couldn’t go over the river without risking another war with Greendale. The nearest other town, a tumbledown place called Athens, was an entire day’s walk away, and Toni didn’t know anyone who’d managed to make it there and back without being scooped up by the police on the city limits. Grizzly State Park was a good campsite. They wouldn’t have stayed so long if it wasn’t. 

“We need another location,” she said. “A place to meet up first, before we head to Swell Springs, where we can figure out who the spy is. We can’t have them at the new camp. We have to start fresh there.”

“Why are we even moving if there’s a spy, though?” said Sweet Pea. “If they’re here, we should find them out first, before we even move. Otherwise they’ll tell the Red Circle we’re moving and they’ll figure out where we’re going.”

“Sure,” said Toni. “But we need the spy to make a mistake first, so we can figure out who they are. And for that we need to shake things up, make them nervous.” She circled the Marbleman Quarry, halfway between Grizzly State Park and Swell Springs. “We meet there, we find out who it is, we get rid of them, we go on to the new campsite.”

Sweet Pea and Fangs nodded, Fangs raising his hand. Toni blinked at him, waiting for a thought to emerge. “When you say get rid of, you mean-”

“I mean kill them and dump their body in the quarry, yes,” said Toni. “Cheryl may have got me out of Sweetwater, but I’ve learned a lot of things fighting the Red Circle and the cops.”

“Sure,” said Sweet Pea. “Nobody’s denying your BAMF status, Toni. I think what Fangs is saying is, like, how are we going to know who it is? Is this like a witch trial thing? Are they gonna be lighter than a duck or whatever?”

“I don’t know,” said Toni. “I’ve never been in internal affairs before.”

“I don’t think the Serpents have really had an internal affairs before,” Fangs pointed out. “Remember how FP used to deal with people who failed? Cut their tattoo off and shove them over the city limits?”

“Well, we’re going to do him one better. We’re going to show everyone what happens when you break the Serpent Omerta,” Toni said, slipping the green pen into the inside pocket of her jacket.

“If Jug would ever get back,” said Sweet Pea, flopping onto the cot and wincing as his head hit the pillow. He reached behind his head and pulled a hardcover copy of  _ In Cold Blood _ from inside the pillowcase. “How does he even sleep with all this creepy stuff around?”

Toni moved to sit down too, head still spinning, turning over and over in her mind how to catch the spy, how to save the Serpents, how to bring them back from the brink. The unexpected screech of rubber on asphalt sliced her thoughts to ribbons. She ran to the tent flap, pushing aside the canvas. “You didn’t tell me Jughead took the truck,” she called back to Fangs and Sweet Pea.

“He didn’t,” one of them said, both following her out of the tent.

The Serpents’ perpetually half-repaired pickup stood idling next to the med tent. Toni saw Jughead, white-faced and coated in some kind of fine gray grit, sitting in the passenger seat, Old Deuteronomy at the wheel. Jellybean stood at the back of the truck, carefully lifting something- no, someone out of the bed. Someone limp and stained red all over.

Toni ran to the truck, stopping beside the passenger door. Jellybean was carrying Betty, who looked like a child in Jellybean’s massive arms. Betty lay unmoving, barely breathing, reeking with coppery blood smell. Toni stared, unable to move one way or the other.

“Oh, shit,” she heard Sweet Pea say somewhere in the background.

Jellybean moved toward the med tent, pausing beside Toni to bend down and meet her eyes. “Toni, can you help Jughead? He lost his automail leg. Just get him to his tent while I help Doc with Betty. His spare leg should be in there somewhere.” Jellybean’s voice always sounded fuzzy and echoey through the speaker that was her mouth, but in the distant recesses of the sound Toni heard a child’s terror, locked up somewhere in Jellybean’s great brutal body. 

“Okay,” said Toni, turning to the car door and yanking it open. Jughead looked much worse close up. His left leg was gone, the pants leg with it, and he quivered, staring straight ahead. He hadn’t even looked at her when she’d opened the door.

“Jug,” Toni said.

He didn’t even blink, and Toni reached out to tug on his sleeve. He flinched away, and then, like coming out of a dream, he turned to her. “Toni?”

“Hey, Jug,” she said, offering him a steadying hand to help him down. “Let’s get you back to your tent.” Jughead took her hand, and Toni helped him slide his heavy metal arm over her shoulders and half-hop, half-fall out of the truck. They were unsteady, badly balanced with half of Jughead’s body hanging with no support. Toni leaned to the right, trying to pull his center of gravity more directly over their three legs. “Come on. Lean on me,” she said, taking one step forward and then pausing to let Jughead steady himself.

Jughead wobbled, dangerously close to falling and taking Toni down with him. But just as Toni felt Jughead’s balance failing, Fangs was there, and Sweet Pea, lifting Jughead’s other arm to let it rest on Fangs’ shoulders. Toni let out a relieved breath, and took the first step forward. She was comforted to feel Fangs and then Jughead step with her, Sweet Pea walking ahead of them, nervously kicking stones out of their path, and holding open the door flap when they reached Jughead’s tent.

Toni dodged out from under Jughead’s arm as Fangs lowered their friend down onto the cot. Jughead lay very still, breathing hard. Toni massaged her shoulder where the nubs and joints of his automail arm had dug into her flesh.

“How’re you doing, boss?” said Sweet Pea, looking down at Jughead’s white face and already knowing the answer.

“Not great,” said Jughead without opening his eyes. “How’s Betty? Did any of you see her? Did you make sure she got to Doc?”

“Yeah,” Toni said, sitting down on the cot and watching Jughead’s face as she spoke. “Jellybean had her. She wasn’t conscious. She looked bad.”

“I know Doc and JB’ll do everything they can for her, though,” said Sweet Pea quickly. “Doc’s pulled us out of worse scrapes before, right, Fangs?”

“About once a week. Betty’s tough, she’ll make it,” agreed Fangs without conviction.

“What happened to her? And you?” Toni asked.

Jughead shrugged. “We were investigating the Lodges’ properties. South Side Academy, to be specific. But we ran into more trouble than we could handle, I guess.”

“Well, yeah,” said Toni, trying to suppress that familiar burst of anger at Jughead and his absolute failure to notice he had a whole organization at his fingertips, an organization he was supposed to be leading. “You know you literally have the entire Serpents at your disposal, right? You could have waited, got together a mission, and been, I don’t know, prepared.”

“It wouldn’t have helped,” Jughead said, but he turned his face away, and his eyes stayed closed. “It was only two people that did this to us.”

“Two people?” said Sweet Pea. “What were they, Sith lords? Supervillains?”

“Something like that. They weren’t human.”

“Great,” Fangs said, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes and scrubbing them around, trying to wipe away whatever he was imagining. “So the regime really does have supervillains at their disposal now.”

“We knew one of them, though,” said Jughead, finally opening his eyes and looking at Toni.

“Who was it?” she asked, running through all the people in Riverdale she would never want empowered, and coming up with more than she could count.

“Penelope Blossom,” he replied, nodding as Toni shivered. Penelope was at the very top of her list. “You know her better than I do, so tell me, did she always have the power to turn her fingers into massive razor-sharp knives, or do you think that’s a new thing?”

Toni tried to laugh, but it came out more painful, almost a cough instead. “I know her as a homophobic maniac and an awful, awful mother, but I don’t remember her doing any slicing and dicing like you’re talking about. I think she would have slit Cheryl’s throat long ago if it were that easy.” Toni gestured to Jughead’s lack of a leg. “Is she the one who smashed you up?”

“No, that was someone. Skinny blond guy. Betty said she heard Penelope call him Chic.”

“Never heard of him,” said Sweet Pea, but Fangs was nodding. Toni shifted her gaze to him.

“I used to hear about a Chic, back when I was dealing Fizzle Rocks. He hung out with a lot of the Fizzle Freaks.” Fangs paused, and then spoke slowly, as if he were afraid of the impact his words would have, holding back each word until he’d seen the fallout out from the one before. “His name was Chic Cooper, I think.”

“Cooper like Betty?” asked Sweet Pea.

“I don’t know any other Coopers in Riverdale, do you?” said Toni, watching Jughead. He hadn’t reacted visibly, and Toni suspected that he was too exhausted to feel much of anything right now. “So we’ve got Penelope and Chic starting up some kind of Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Chic had something weird going on too, based on the state of your leg.”

“Yeah. He was some kind of shapeshifter. His mass wasn’t right, he could shift it all into his arm or his leg and hit with way too much force. Stomped me, and, well, you can see the result,” said Jughead, gesturing to his lack of leg. “Penelope could heal too. She walked off three or four direct shots from Betty.”

“Unstoppable supersoldiers working for the Lodges,” said Toni, slumping to rest her head on her hands. “I know we like playing the underdog here at the South Side Serpents, but this is getting ridiculous.”

“Don’t give up now, Toni,” said Jughead, poking her with the tip of his foot. “I can’t take any more bad news right now. Not until Betty’s better.”

“But we haven’t even told you about the spy!” Sweet Pea interjected.

“Spy?” Jughead sat up, and then fell back, breathing hard. “Forget what I just said, tell me, no matter how bad.”

Toni opened her mouth to speak, but a shout from outside interrupted her. The shout was followed by a slap, and the sounds of a scuffle. Jughead groaned. “Sweet Pea, Fangs, can you see what’s happening out there? If I get up again, I think I really will die.”

Fangs and Sweet Pea ducked out of the tent, and Toni heard them shouting across the camp. Jughead gestured for her to go on. “Lay it on me, Toni. I can’t get any lower.”

“We don’t have any definitive proof, Jughead, I won’t lie. But I was thinking over everything that’s been going wrong for us the last couple months. Every time we try to make a move, there the Red Circle is, waiting for us like they knew we would be there. We haven’t had a single totally successful mission in months. That’s not bad odds, that’s something else. That’s prior knowledge.”

Jughead nodded. “You’re right, like usual. I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.”

In her mind, Toni responded, pointing out exactly how little time Jughead spent with the Serpents, how often he went investigating with Betty, how he was able to walk around freely in Riverdale for some reason while the rest of the Serpents were getting hauled off to black sites. But when she looked at him, the way he was already collapsing inward, white-faced and bruised all over, Toni didn’t have the heart. He wasn’t a good king, but he was her friend.

The tent flaps fluttered, and Sweet Pea and Fangs returned, dragging a kicking, clawing, squirming person between them. Toni stared and so did Jughead, both of them recognizing the captive at the same time. “Veronica?”

Veronica looked up at the sound of her name, pausing in her struggle. She was more a mess than Toni had ever seen before, hair wild and full of leaves, black sweatsuit torn and nicked in any number of places. Her face was smudged with soot too. “Jughead!” she said, but stopped, looking him over and seeing that he was in even worse shape than she was. “Jughead, what happened to you?” The color drained from Veronica’s face, the sudden loss of blood visible even under the ashen smears. “Is Betty okay?”

Jughead shook his head, and then tensed up, folding in on himself. It took Toni a second to understand that he was crying, a harsh shallow sound. Veronica tore herself free from Sweet Pea and Fangs, both just as stunned and still as Toni, and knelt beside Jughead’s cot. Toni watched, disbelieving, as Veronica hugged Jughead, and he hugged her back, clinging to her. Toni could just barely hear him, telling Veronica something about Betty as Veronica nodded along.

Sweet Pea caught Toni’s eye and gestured between himself and Fangs, and then back outside. Toni nodded and the duo crept out of the tent. Toni, though, stayed put. She folded her hands in her lap and looked down at them, picking at a chipped place in the polish on her thumbnail. It was nearly time to redo her nails, if she ever got the time.

The next time Toni looked up she met Veronica’s eyes. The soot on Veronica’s face was striated with tear tracks, and she reached up to dry them as she released Jughead, who fell back onto the cot, looking as though he were on the very edge of consciousness. Veronica pulled the chair from the desk and sat in it, still closer to Jughead than Toni.

Toni examined Veronica again, realizing how beat up the other woman was, how tired she looked. “How’d you find us, Veronica?” Toni asked.

“Betty told me about where the camp was, in case I ever needed to get up here,” said Veronica, smoothing the wrinkles from her pants, which just drew attention to the long jagged tear in the left knee.

“I see,” said Toni, letting her hands open and close in her lap. “Did Betty share a lot about the Serpents with you?”

“Toni, what does this have to do-” said Jughead, but Toni flicked his words out of the air with a wave of her hand. She had learned that move from Cheryl.

“She’s the leak, Jug. She has to be. You tell Betty what we do, she tells Veronica, Veronica tells her parents. It’s obvious.”

Toni watched Veronica’s face fall, slackening as if she’d aged ten or twenty years in a second. “You’re almost right, Toni. I think I know who the leak is. And it is my fault.”

Jughead snapped his gaze to Veronica, all sorrow suddenly submerged. “What do you mean?”

“Archie was the leak. I’d tell him what you were all up to when he asked. I thought maybe he’d get this whole resistance thing if he knew you and Betty were doing it. But he was telling my mom and dad. He’s been working for the Red Circle since he came back from Sweetwater. In the field even, at least for the last few weeks.” As Veronica said this, her voice grew quieter and quieter until it was almost inaudible. “He’s our Benedict Archibald.”

Jughead smashed his fist down on the edge of the cot, and recoiled at the pain of his flesh hand hitting the steel frame. “I can’t believe this. I knew he’d sucked down all the kool-aid your parents offered him, but I never thought he would sell us out completely.”

Veronica didn’t reply. She was wiping her face again, a fall of hair shielding her tears from Toni’s eyes.

Toni looked between Veronica and Jughead, unsure who had disappointed her more. “And you just figured this out today, Veronica? Archie’s been working for your parents for years.”

To Toni’s surprise, it was Jughead who spoke up. “Archie’s our friend. You can’t understand, Toni. He was one of us even after he started working for the Lodges, even after he pushed me and Betty away.”

“I thought he’d come back,” added Veronica. “I just found out everything today, leading a Red Circle team. That’s how I know there’s nothing we can do for him anymore.”

Toni stood up. She needed to pace, or she’d slap both of them. “Sure. And in the meantime he’s directly responsible for decimating our ranks and crashing our missions.” When her circuit brought her face-to-face with Veronica again, Toni asked “What was he doing for the Red Circle?”

“It was weird,” Veronica replied, her face now dry, but shiny and smudgier than ever. “Nick St. Clair, that awful date rapist from the summer-”

“I remember him,” said Toni, speaking instead of grinding her teeth at the thought of the prep school prick touching Cheryl.

“He was at the Five Seasons, but he was not like he used to be. He could heal, even from a gunshot, and he could cover himself with an invulnerable skin. Bullets bounced off him.”

Toni looked at Jughead, who nodded. “Sounds familiar.”

Veronica raised her eyebrows, and said “Have you been having superproblems too?”

“Penelope Blossom and some guy called Chic Cooper. They’re why I’m short one limb and Betty’s...hurt so bad.” Jughead choked on the last part of the sentence.

“Nick tried to explain it to me. He said it had something to do with a weird tattoo on his hand. A snake swallowing itself with a star inside.”

“Penelope and Chic had the same ones,” said Jughead. “So that solves a little of the mystery.”

“Betty will be excited to hear about it when she’s feeling better,” said Veronica, laying a hand on Jughead’s shoulder, who reached up to take her hand with his own.

Toni looked away to roll her eyes. When she felt like she’d released all her exasperation for the moment, she looked back and saw Jughead and Veronica leaning against each other, both seeming almost to flicker with exhaustion and misery. They could bear nothing more. Toni cursed her own weakness, and she cursed Jughead’s blinding love for Betty, and she cursed Veronica’s stupid trust in stupid Archie, but most of all she cursed Riverdale and the Lodges and everyone who’d built this awful, bloody, brutal world they inhabited.

“Look, Jug, Veronica, we have to do something about this. You’re here, Veronica, and I’m sure your parents will come looking. The Serpents are all there is, all the resistance in Riverdale, and they know where we are. If the Red Circle comes here tonight, it’s all over. We have to move,” said Toni, already knowing what Jughead would say, and tearing her own brain apart to find a solution that could please them both.

As expected, Jughead groaned and let his head flop back against the pillow, his voice resonating at the exact pitch of misery. “We can’t move Betty. Not until she’s stable.”

“How about this, Toni?” said Veronica, standing to match her height, even as she wobbled, grabbing the top of a chair for support. “You and the rest of the Serpents pack up and scatter. I’ll stay here with Jughead, Betty, Jellybean, and Doc. If the Red Circle picks us up, so be it. I might be able to reason with my parents. And you and the Serpents will still be out there, still fighting the good fight. And if, by some miracle, my parents’ goons don’t sweep through tonight and execute us, we’ll find you.”

Toni felt a swelling of ambition in her chest. This was her chance to take the Serpents in a better direction, a direction that might even end up rescuing Cheryl. But Jughead, Betty, JB. To just leave them alone with Veronica and Doc… Toni shook her head, and realized it looked like she was shooting Veronica down. She met Veronica’s gaze and nodded once. “That’s a good plan, Veronica. I’m going to rouse the Serpents.” Toni grabbed the map off the table, and showed Veronica where the quarry was. “We’re headed to Marbleman Quarry. If you survive, head there and we’ll find you.”

“Alright. That’s how it’ll be,” Jughead said, barely audible, already sinking down into his cot like he was dissolving. Toni knew she didn’t have long before he lost consciousness, and so she reached out to him, taking his left hand, skin to skin, and squeezed once. “Good luck, Jug.”

Jughead looked up at her, eyes filmy with misery, and said “I’ll see you at the Quarry, Toni.” He squeezed her hand back, and she barely felt it.

Toni folded the map and put it in her pocket alongside the green gel pen, and left Jughead and Veronica, one nearly unconscious and the other shoving together a little bed of her own on the floor from Jughead’s spare blankets. The last thing Toni heard of her friends was the crinkle of burger wrappers as Veronica kicked them aside to make room for her pallet.

Outside, Toni was pleased to see Sweet Pea and Fangs had taken the initiative and gathered all the remaining Serpents in the center of camp. Toni climbed on top of the nearest picnic table and took a deep breath.

“Serpents!” She called out and, as one, they looked to her, faces open with fear and worry and hunger for reassurance. Toni wished she had any to give them. “We’re moving out. Jughead is staying here to see to the wounded and hold down camp, but the rest of us are leaving. We’re headed to Marbleman Quarry. Move in two and threes, no more, and stay low and quiet. We’re not losing anyone else tonight. Pack your things and move out as soon as you can. If we’re lucky, I’ll see you all at the quarry tomorrow.” Toni lifted her fist to the air. “Even when we’re scattered, we’re all part of the same great snake. In unity, there is strength!” The rush of hearing them all say it after her was almost overwhelming, and she clutched the high of power close for a half second before she remembered why she’d gathered them all together. “Move out!”

In the scramble after, Toni found Fangs and Sweet Pea, bags already over their shoulders, looking to her expectantly. “Do you think we’ll figure out who the spy is before we all get to the quarry?” Sweet Pea asked as Toni packed her camera and lenses, clicking the covers into place and sliding them into her travel bag.

“Veronica thinks the spy was Archie. I’m not sure I buy it. Archie’s not reliable. The Lodges are smarter than that. We’re going to the Quarry, and then we’re deciding whether or not to move onto Swell Springs.”

“What about Jughead? JB?” asked Fangs, handing her a pile of clothes from under her cot.

Toni stopped, fists clenched around the ball of socks and skirts and shirts. “He’ll find us. We’ll figure it.”

Sweet Pea nodded. “Whatever you say, Tones. You know me and Fangs have got your back.”

Toni dropped her clothes and hugged them both, chest tight with a fullness she hadn’t remembered she could feel at all. “You’re the best, guys.”

Within another minute or so, Toni had everything packed. She surveyed the camp one last time, watched the tents fold down and the Serpents disappear into the dark woods bearing all the meager possessions. She watched the light into Jughead’s tent flick out, and then the same happen in the med tent. Jellybean emerged, hands and arms shiny dark in a nauseating way. Toni went to her, rapping once on Jellybean’s shoulder, the tinny echo getting the girl’s attention. Jellybean looked down at her.

“Toni. How’s Jughead?”

“Last I saw of him, he was in the middle of passing out. Veronica’s in there with him. I think he’ll be okay.”

Jellybean’s eyes flickered with a soft blue tint that Toni had come to recognize as the closest thing to a smile Jellybean could produce anymore. “Thank you for helping him, Toni.”

“Listen, JB,” said Toni, not wanting to think about whether she was really doing Jughead any favors. “We’re all heading out. It’s going to be just a few of you left here and the Red Circle could show up at any time.”

“I know,” said Jellybean, and her voice was so flat she really did seem like a robot. “I’ll watch out for them. You know I don’t sleep anymore.”

Toni wanted to hug Jellybean, but the gore splashed across the girl’s front repelled her, and so she crushed her own hands together before her instead. “How’s Betty?”

“Doc thinks she’ll live. But whether or not she’ll keep her arm, we can’t say. It’s not looking good, but a field amputation isn’t a great prospect either.” As Jellybean said this, she sprayed herself with the hose, wine-dark water rolling down her chassis and pooling in the grass.

Toni watched the water because it was dark and deep, and because it was Betty’s pain made visible, and that was easier to witness than all the pain that Jellybean couldn’t even cry over. “Whatever you and Doc decide, I know it’ll be the right choice. Good luck, Jellybean.” Toni forced herself to look up at Jellybean, whose eyes were now bright white, like they were burning. “I know I’ll see you soon.”

“I hope so. Good-bye, Toni.” Jellybean turned away, moving off toward Jughead’s tent.

Toni walked out of camp, Sweet Pea and Fangs falling in behind her. “Here we go, boys.”

Ahead of them were the endless shadowy well of the woods. Behind them was the shattered shell of their camp. Toni led them into the darkness without hesitation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next update: 5/24/2019 due to thesis reasons, but I promise the wait will be worth it! In this chapter, Betty wakes up and discovers she's missed quite a lot...


	5. Fearful Symmetry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Betty wakes up, and as usual she starts putting the puzzle pieces together, leading to a terrible realization and a fearsome resolution.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!

When Betty woke up, the first thing she felt was absence. It was more terrifying than pain. Pain meant you existed, that you were responding to the world. Absence meant the opposite. She lay completely unmoving, her eyes still closed, and prepared herself for what she would see when she opened her eyes. She wondered if she should try sitting up, if she could manage it with just one arm and no practice. The empty place where her right arm should be seemed to burn. On the inside of her eyelids Betty could see her silhouette inscribed in flame-bright lines that highlighted its broken symmetry.

Betty crushed a corner of her bedsheet in her hand, pouring her anxiety into it. She would get by. Jughead did. She could learn to use automail. She could learn to shoot left-handed. There was nothing else to do. Betty ran this track through her brain until she could bear to uncurl her aching fingers and her heartbeat slowed to its normal pace.

She opened her eyes. It was day, bright light streaming in through the open tent flap. Betty recognized the Serpents’ medical tent from the stacks of crates in one corner marked with the caduceus, the plain white sheets on all the cots. She started to sit up, sliding her arm out behind her for support, and flinched as her feet bumped into something at the end of the cot. As Betty became progressively more upright, she realized the object she’d encountered was Jughead, half sitting in a folding chair, half sprawled across the bed, his beanie shoved under his head to act as a pillow. Eyes closed, mouth open, and arms akimbo, Jughead was obviously asleep, and had probably been that way for a while.

Heat prickled the skin on Betty’s chest and the corners of her eyes. How long had Jughead been waiting for her? Shifting to sit cross-legged at the head of the cot, Betty wondered whether it would be better to wake Jughead up and tell him she was okay or let him sleep a little bit longer. In sleep his face was like a new-cleaned window, bright and clear and accepting of her gaze, no nervousness or exhaustion building barriers between them. Betty watched him take slow, soft breaths, barely audible. With each rise and fall of his chest, one dark curl slid a few centimeters farther down his cheek. Without thinking, Betty reached forward and gently brushed it back behind Jughead’s ear. Even as she did it, Betty felt him tense ever so slightly, the rhythm of his breathing catch as he opened his eyes and looked up at her.

There was something in his expression that Betty couldn’t quite catch hold of, so she let it wash over her instead, and felt warm and whole down to the tips of her fingers and the ends of her toes.

“Betty?” said Jughead very quietly, and then his eyes went wide, and he shot to his feet, sweeping her up in a hug that very carefully avoided disturbing the thick pad of bandages covering her right shoulder. The hard metal fingertips of Jughead’s right hand dug into Betty’s ribs and she responded by squeezing her own arm around him all the tighter.

“I was so afraid,” Jughead said, so close to her ear that it tickled, and she fought the urge to laugh and flinch away. Instead she whispered back to him, “It did feel a little touch-and-go there for a while. I definitely had a few ominous visions of deceased relatives telling me my time had come.”

Jughead laughed. “How is Nana Rose doing?” And that was enough to start Betty laughing too.

“She was actually the only one who told me to stick around. Said she hadn’t died to see Cheryl rot away in jail without a single Armondi gown for comfort.”

“Did somebody mention Armondi?” Betty knew immediately who had spoken, long before Jughead had leapt back from her to reveal Veronica standing at the tent entrance. Veronica looked oddly older dressed in Serpents’ cast-offs, Brawl-Mart quality jeans and a black tank-top, but even so she cut a terribly stylish figure. Sidling over the cot, Veronica grabbed Jughead’s beanie and tossed it to him, then sat down just where it had lain. Jughead jammed the hat back onto his head, covering the chaos currently curling all over his head.

Veronica sighed deeply and stretched, letting her arms slide out behind her until she looked like a model on a magazine cover. Betty wondered if this performance was intended to cover the appraising way Veronica’s eyes flicked over her and Jughead, pausing at her foreshortened right shoulder and Jughead’s general state of dishevelment.

“What I wouldn’t give for some Armondi just about now,” said Veronica, tossing her hair and smiling at Betty. “Grunge might be good enough for Jughead and Kurt Cobain, but it’s a little passé in Paris. But enough about me. How are you feeling, Betty? We were really worried about you.”

Betty wasn’t sure how to answer that question. She still felt a terrible aching anxiety about the loss of her arm, about how long it would take her to heal and get back to normal. Whatever normal was. But here, with Jughead and Veronica, both of them open-faced and sincere in their joy at seeing her awake, she felt a bit like she could do anything. “I’m doing about as well as you could expect, I guess,” she said, glancing for the first time at her truncated right shoulder, the curve that she’d gotten so used to seeing flow into an arm that she’d never imagined a world where it didn’t. “I know this is going to change some things for me, but if Jug can figure it out, so can I.” She grinned at Jughead, whose face flooded with happiness in response. “Not that I’m diminishing your achievements, Jug.”

Still smiling, Jughead shook his head. “I think you’re in better shape than I was at this point in the game. If JB can throw something together, then maybe you’ll be able to pick up automail in the next couple weeks.” His smile fell away as he went on. “If your wound is healing right. Field amputations are nothing to be sneezed at. Doc and JB were working on you for hours.”

A thought clicked into place in Betty’s mind, and, hard as she tried, she couldn’t shake it. So she spoke it, against her better judgment. “What did you...what did you do with my arm? After-”

Jughead bit his lip, eyes sliding away from hers, and it was Veronica who spoke instead. “JB buried it. She left a marker there if you ever want to...visit it, I guess.”

“It is a spooky thought,” said Betty, now unable to take her eyes off her right shoulder, examining the contours, wondering what awful gash waited under the bandages, how much medication she was on right now not to feel any pain. “There’s a part of me already in its grave, in the ground, and I’m just going to keep on living, probably end up in a grave far away from here.”

Jughead reached out, took her left hand in his. “Hey there, Wednesday Addams. You’re here now. That’s all that matters.”

“Jughead’s right,” said Veronica, standing and fastidiously brushing away some invisible dirt from her clothes as if they had a dollar value of more than twenty. “Jellybean will fix you up with an automail prosthetic, and you’ll be a regular old Luke Skywalker: blonde, brave, evil dad, robot hand, fighting for the cause of the righteous.”

Betty laughed. “I wish. At least when Luke lost his hand, he got some valuable intel from Darth Vader. My arm was cut off by my aunt, and all I got from it was this lousy lack of a limb.”

“We didn’t quite get nothing,” said Jughead, “especially not once Veronica shared her recent discoveries with me.”

Betty’s eyes brightened, hungry for answers. “What did you find out, V?”

“Well, first and foremost, I learned that a girl can do anything with the right accessory,” said Veronica, reaching into her pants pocket and pulling out a pair of white gloves.

“I’m pretty sure you already knew that,” said Betty. She smiled as she spoke, but her eyes were running over the gloves in Veronica’s hand, picking out the red threads, puzzling out the transmutation circle they created. “What do they do?”

“Are you feeling up to standing?” asked Jughead, holding out a hand to Betty. “Because showing is always more potent than telling.”

Betty didn’t pause to think on it, grabbing Jughead’s hand and letting him pull her off the bed and to her feet. She was surprised by her own stability after being unconscious for so long, but she reminded herself that she had lost nothing irreplaceable, nothing she couldn’t live without. Jughead and Veronica were still here, after all, and so Betty stepped almost lightly out of the tent, Veronica leading the way and Jughead behind them, hand hovering just behind the small of Betty’s back, caught between the desire to touch and the fear of invading. Betty thought about letting herself fall back into it, the relief that would be, but she held herself back, knowing that Jug had too much already to worry about. As much as she needed Jughead and Veronica to buoy her, they needed her too.

Veronica came to a stop about three meters from a pile of dry brown brush which was lumped in the Serpents’ fire pit. Betty watched as Veronica slipped one of the white gloves on and held her hand out before her, shoving the other one back into her pocket. Veronica snapped her thumb and forefinger together, and before Betty could fully process the sound, everything went white hot and bright. The brush pile burnt uproariously, crackling and boiling over with flame. Betty reflexively took a step back, letting her back press against Jughead’s hand for just a second before she pulled away and put her brave face back on.

“Veronica, that was amazing! Is that flame alchemy?” she said, and Veronica nodded, strolling back to Betty and Jughead with a smile on her face that curved her lips and the corners of her eyes in the same way, a symmetry of joy that Betty hadn’t seen on her best friend’s face in a long time.

“You like? Reggie lifted them from the RDPD weapons locker. I seem to have a knack,” Veronica replied, delicately tugging each finger until the glove slid free.

“You light up our lives, Veronica,” said Jughead. “And that’s not all you lit up, right?”

“Riverdale may be tragically short one luxury hotel, it’s true. But was the Five Seasons ever really more than a knock-off Ritz, my dears?”

Betty gaped. “You burnt down the Five Seasons?”

“You can’t be too shocked, B. Jughead told me you and he did quite the number on South Side Academy,” said Veronica, grimacing as the wind picked up and smoke washed over them. “Jughead, can you put that out? Showing off is fun, but it’s really not bonfire season.”

Jughead nodded, and knelt, pressing his hands together. He touched them to the earth and it shifted, rising into a great brown hand that flowed out of the ground and smothered the fire before dissolving into a heap of dirt.

“It wasn’t really us who collapsed South Side Academy,” said Betty, thinking back to the dark, damp bowels of the building, the heaps of shriveled bodies lining the halls. “It was rigged to blow. To cover up whatever the Lodges were really up to in there.”

“Anyway, wanton destruction of property is really the least interesting similarity between our recent adventures,” said Jughead, standing and popping the knuckles of his left hand as if the simple alchemy had been an exertion. “What really stands out is the fact that we both met superpowered maniacs in the pay of Veronica’s parents.”

“Same tattoos, same crazy healing factor, same connection to my parents,” Veronica said. “When I met Nick St. Clair, he had all the same freaky traits as Penelope and Chic, and he was very clear about how he got his magic powers: he swallowed some red stone. I watched Archie almost cut it out of him.”

A door unlocked in Betty’s mind, so suddenly and perfectly that she almost heard the mechanism click inside her. “The pillar in the transmutation circle at South Side Academy, before he left, Chic grabbed a red stone off of it. That must have been what they were making from…” She swallowed hard, seeing all the dead faces again, their shriveled skin and pain-tightened jaws. “From all those people Dr. Curdle was transmuting.”

“Oh no.” Jughead was frozen, eyes wide and staring into the distance. Both Betty and Veronica turned, afraid he’d seen the Red Circle death squad that they all assumed would punch their last ticket one day. But there was no one on the horizon. Whatever Jughead was seeing was a mind’s eye exclusive.

“Care to share with the class, Mr. Jones, or should we start throwing out guesses?” Veronica asked, one eyebrow raised.

Jughead bit his lip, letting his teeth slide along his skin as if the pain would help him find words. After a deep breath, he spoke. “There’s a legend in alchemical circles about a powerful magical item created by transmuting human life. Souls. It’s called the philosopher’s stone. If you have one, you can draw on it to do alchemy that shouldn’t be possible. You can break the law of equivalent exchange, take and take and take without giving anything of your own back.”

“And if you had one bonded to your body, you could do a lot of impossible things,” Veronica added. “Like regrow all the skin on your body.”

“Or shift all your mass into one limb.”

“Or turn your fingers into infinitely long blades,” concluded Betty, touching the bandage on her shoulder. She touched it so lightly she felt nothing, and still she flinched.

“So let’s say, just for fun,” Veronica said, “that philosopher’s stones are real, and they do everything Jughead says. My parents aren’t alchemists; what do they want with these stones? Other than to make an even more ethically dubious fashion statement than a blood diamond.”

“That’s what we have to find out next,” said Betty. She felt both utterly exhausted and terribly exhilarated. There were answers, and she would find them. But the bloody price of those answers? Betty had a bad feeling she’d only begun paying it.

“Next steps?” Jughead said.

“We don’t have enough info to act yet,” said Betty. “We need to think on this more, figure out where to start searching.”

Veronica interjected. “We need to figure out what we’re searching for first. Let me see if I can connect with Reggie, find out what’s been stirred up in the aftermath of the Five Seasons and South Side Academy.”

“And what are we supposed to do in the meantime?” asked Jughead.

“You two are going to rest up! You both took serious hits at South Side Academy and you are not even close to recovered!” Veronica grabbed Betty and Jughead by their shoulders and pointed them back to the medical tent. “Rest! Heal! Take a spa day! And then we’ll end this insanity and get some answers.”

“Let us know what you hear from Reggie,” Betty called to Veronica’s retreating back, the other woman already headed toward the edge of camp. Veronica snapped a thumbs up back to them in response.

“I guess we’ve received our marching orders for the foreseeable future,” Jughead said, offering Betty his arm.

Taking it, she laughed. “Aren’t you supposed to be a serious leader, what with the Serpents and all?”

“Alas,” Jughead responded as they walked back to the medical tent. “It’s been my experience that trying to resist Veronica’s orders is like the Titanic trying to reason with the iceberg.”

“You’re not wrong.”

Back in the tent, Betty knew she should rest, go back to sleep, but in her mind she was gnawing at the mystery of it all, trying to peel back the layers and get her hands around the answers. She paced around the tent while Jughead sprawled on one of the cots, tightening the bolts in the knuckles of his new automail arm. Well, new wasn’t the right word for it. Betty recognized the arm as one of Jughead’s old spares, a little shorter than his left arm. He must have grown since he used it last.

Betty shook her head, trying to clear her mind, and shivered at the tickle of her hair, loose and wild against the back of her neck. She reached up to gather it into a ponytail and realized she was missing several of the tools she usually relied on for the operation.

“Jug?”

“What’s up?” he said, looking up at Betty, eyebrows raised.

“Can you help me out here? I’m gonna need more practice before I can make a ponytail one-handed, I think.”

Jughead dropped his screwdriver and hopped off the bed. He walked past Betty and grabbed a latex glove from a box, slipping it over his right hand. Betty watched him, a little bemused.

“I guess I haven’t washed my hair in a while, but I didn’t think it was that gross.”

“Oh, no! That’s not why I got this!” said Jughead, and Betty saw him blush before he moved behind her. “Sometimes hair gets caught in the joints of my automail. It hurts like a slap from Cheryl.” Betty felt him running his fingers through her hair, gathering it into the usual ponytail, and all the tension in her body rushed away like a dam had been broken. “I really, really don’t want to hurt you,” Jughead said, snapping a band around her hair, and grabbing a small mirror from Doc’s side table. He held it up before her and Betty saw herself the way she always imagined, hair bound back and her face free of frames or outside impositions. Over her shoulder, Jughead, eyes rounder and softer than she’d ever seen them, smiling at her reflection.

And then Betty’s gaze caught on the curve of her jaw, the exact color of her eyes, and she screamed so loudly Jughead dropped the mirror, both hands flying to her shoulders. She turned in his arms, the two of them almost nose-to-nose, Betty’s breathing ragged and staccato.

“Betty, what is it? Is it your shoulder?”

“Jug…” Betty swallowed hard, clenching her fist at her side, and she tried to put her thoughts in order. “Jug, I was looking at my face, and I saw- I look like Chic, Jug. He looks like me.”

Jughead went the bloodless white of long exposed bones. “Maybe Fangs was right.”

“What did Fangs say?” said Betty, grabbing Jughead’s left wrist, only realizing how hard she was squeezing when her own fingers began to ache.

“Before the Serpents left, he told me he used to know a guy, back when he was dealing, a guy named Chic.” Now it was Jughead’s turn to struggle and stall as he tried to speak. “Chic Cooper.”

Betty swayed on her feet, but managed to stay upright, bracing herself between Jughead’s arms. “That doesn’t make any sense. My mom didn’t have any kids before Polly. She only- Oh, Jug. Oh no.” Betty pressed her arm across her chest, trying to hold her feelings in. She remembered a time, many years ago, when she’d been flipping through the family photo albums, laughing at the eternally humorous sight of her parents with different haircuts and silly clothes, when she’d come across a picture of her mother, round-bellied and smiling, with a date on it far too early for the pregnancy to be Polly. She’d gone to her mother with the picture, excited by the idea of some long-lost sibling, another mystery to solve. Betty remembered exactly the cold, sucking feeling in her heart as her mother explained in simple words what a miscarriage is, her voice squeezing itself shut every few words.

Jughead was watching Betty’s face, his face caught between expectation and concern. Betty took a deep breath and went on. “Before she had Polly, my mom had a miscarriage. A baby who was born way too early, the doctors told her. It didn’t live after she delivered it.”

Tears gathered in Betty’s eyes and she saw them reflected back to her in Jughead’s eyes too. “But maybe the baby didn’t die,” he said. “Maybe the doctors just told your mom it did.”

“And took it away to be another medical experiment. A test subject for these philosopher’s stones.”

“It tracks with the general military-medical-industrial complex of Riverdale,” Jughead said. “Seems like they really delight in making medical miracles of our siblings, huh?”

“Seems like the Lodges and their cronies delight in making a misery of everything in all our lives,” Betty said, pulling away from Jug to stand on her own, the orange afternoon light pouring in the tent flap falling over her. She saw herself reflected in Jughead’s eyes, haloed in warm light like an angel. A bright-burning, avenging angel.

“We’re going back to Riverdale, Jughead. Tomorrow night,” she said. “We’re going back there and we’re going to get some answers. About Chic, about philosopher’s stones, about Jellybean. Everything. And we’re going to make everybody who hurt us pay. One way or another.” She reached out to Jughead. He looked from her face to her outstretched hand, and then he took her hand.

“One way or another.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm in a celebratory mood, so let's say there will be two updates in June.
> 
> Another short Archie interlude: 6/7/2019
> 
> And then we get to see Jughead, Veronica, and Betty go full dark, no stars for some serious answers (which, incidentally, will mark the end of Act I of this torturously lengthy tale): 6/21/2019


	6. Archie Does and Does Not Let This Fear Run His Life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Archie follows some medical advice for Hiram Lodge which somehow turns into a Faustian bargain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is brought to you by the letter G, for Graduation! And Gargoyle King obviously.

It was the wanting that was the problem. Archie wanted so much so badly. Veronica, a home, happiness. His dad back. Jughead, Betty, Cheryl, Josie, Reggie, Kevin, all of them to be normal again, and happy. But the box had been opened, and everything good in the world had flown free long ago, leaving only pain behind, and one tiny shred of hope, which was worse still.

Archie wondered where he was. He didn’t seem to be anywhere. The space around him was a soft dove grey. He wasn’t sure if he was standing or floating, but it was a sort of relief either way. To give up all effort, even that of resisting gravity. He leaned into it, letting himself be buoyed along by unseen currents shearing their way through the fog of nothingness.

Before him was more nothingness. Archie watched it throb gently, curls of greyer grey spiraling in on themselves. It was nice, like a screensaver. When he was a kid, Archie would sit and watch his dad’s computer screen flow and flex for hours at time. He always felt lucky, his dad being one of the few people in Riverdale who had a computer at home. Archie loved the reliable shifting of the little dots and orbs, the way they always ended up back in the shape they’d started in. You could count on them in a way you couldn’t count on much else.

Archie thought he could count on his dad like that too, back then. But the Black Hood had torn that illusion from his hands, leaving Archie bereft in a way he’d never imagined. He’d literally never thought his body could hold such reservoirs of pain. It ached like a sore muscle that never relaxed, like a toothache in a tooth he could never get pulled. It hurt like an eternity, and Archie thought that if he lived forever he would still never lose this pain.

The nothingness clotted before him, thickening and darkening into a humanoid shape. Archie watched it happen, unmoved to either fear or interest. It would be what it was, whatever it was. The shape was becoming more and more defined every second, and Archie thought it was somehow familiar, transforming into someone he knew very well. It wasn’t until a little dent formed in the person’s forehead that Archie realized he was looking himself dead in the eyes.

The other Archie smiled, a big warm welcoming smile that Archie hardly remembered ever making. “Hey, funny running into you here.”

Archie blinked at his other self, still only shades of gray and diffuse around the edges. “I don’t really know what to say to you.”

Other Archie shrugged. “That’s too bad. When I showed up to Nick St. Clair, he had a quip right on the tip of his tongue.”

“You talked to Nick St. Clair?” said Archie, confused as ever. “I feel kinda weird that he was having visions about me.”

“No,” said Other Archie, not entirely suppressing an eyeroll. “I appear to the person who receives the stone as whoever they are. I’m not really you, Archie. I’m the animating force of this philosopher’s stone. I’m Greed.”

“Sorry, but I don’t know what a philosopher’s stone is. I think you have the wrong guy.” Archie suddenly felt oddly chilled by the grey nowhere place. How did he get here? Where had he been before now? He couldn’t remember.

The clouds around the two Archies contracted, pressing in on them like they stood in the core of a gas giant. Out of the clouds came more shapes, all the friends and family Archie had just been thinking of, but better, happier, cleaner. Their faces were softer and rounder, their clothes and haircuts new. They were like the people of Riverdale Archie knew, but also beautifully different, smoothed out and simple, like a freshly ironed sheet. They stood around him and the Other Archie, and they all smiled at the same time.

Gesturing to them with one hand and extending the other to Archie, the doppelganger spoke again. “Archie, I’m here with you because you want things you think you can’t have. You want things that are beyond the power of anyone to give. But nothing’s really out of reach. I can give you power, Archie. I can give you the power you need, and with it you can have everything you want.”

In a rush, Archie remembered where he’d been before this. It was a doctor’s appointment, Mr. Lodge recommended it. The doctor gave him a bright little pill to swallow, and then he was here. “I-I don’t know. Power can be dangerous. And it’s hard. I’m just Archie Andrews. I’m a nobody. Why do you want me to have this power?”

Other Archie smiled wider than ever, and the expression departed the realm of the joyful and became a grand and terrible grin, accommodating many more teeth than Archie thought he normally possessed. “Because you want things, Archie. You’ll do something interesting. Nick St. Clair was a waste. He already had it all. He was just bored. But you, Archie, you’re hungry. You’re desperate. I like that in a host.”

“I don’t even know what kind of power this is,” said Archie, hesitant, scanning the contours of the Other Archie’s hand, looking for discrepancies, alien alterations, anything that would betray the Other Archie as an enemy. “I don’t really need to be Superman or Pureheart the Powerful.” He thought of Veronica, the look she’d given him before she’d burned down the Five Seasons. “Being powerful like that doesn’t always help.”

“Don’t worry, kid,” Other Archie said. “The power I can give you is indescribable. It’s unlimited. It’s manifold.”

“What?”

Other Archie pressed his eyes shut for a long moment. “It’s got a lot of different aspects and forms. There’s a lot you can do with it. It’s not just being super strong and super durable like Nick was.” The Other Archie paused to snap his fingers, dismissing the shadows of Archie’s friends and replacing them with six new figures, some of them familiar and some of them unknown to Archie. “I can make you part of a team, a family that’s indelible. It will never break down. And we have a Father at our head who’ll never leave us.”

Archie looked from face to face around him. He saw Mr. Lodge and Fuhrer Lodge, and thought about how kind they had been to him. How hard they worked to protect Riverdale. How they’d helped him after Sweetwater and the bear attack and losing his dad. He looked back at his grey, ghostly reflection. “Who’s this father guy?”

“He’s our Father and our King. He’s the one built Riverdale from the foundations up. Fuhrer Lodge might run the day-to-day, but our Father is the one who carries the town on His back. Anything you want, He can make come to pass. Anything you fear, He can stop. All you have to do is take my hand.” Other Archie wriggled his fingers enticingly. “Come on, Archie. Don’t you want to change things? Don’t you want to make it all right?”

It was the wanting that was overwhelming. It was a screaming, sucking, hungry wound in his chest. Archie did want to make it all right. Better, even. He wanted to fix the awful way everything in Riverdale always came screaming off the rails. He was scorched with longing, not for power, but for his friends, for Veronica, for them to come back and admit they’d been wrong to fight the Lodges. To fight him.

Archie reached out and took the doppelganger’s hand. The Other Archie’s hand grew soft and smoke-like once more, flowing into Archie’s own skin until the boundaries between the two Archies collapsed completely, and they were one Archie in two places, a universe examining itself and marveling at what it saw. At the point where their two hands met, Archie realized he could see and feel everything down to the very atoms, the basic particles of being Archie. He could rearrange them. He could rewrite himself.

Before Archie could form a solid thought, though, the flow of Other Archie into his hand accelerated, and his veins filled with icy cold water. Archie scratched at his chest, feeling a slick, slippery sensation worming its way through his nervous system and wrapping itself tightly around his brain. He heard the Other Archie’s voice echoing in his mind, and he could only barely distinguish it from his own thoughts.

“I forgot to mention, Archie. You’re certainly allowed to contribute ideas and throw in suggestions, but I sit in the driver’s seat. You’re not really prepared to manage things like this.”

 _You lied!_ Archie said. Or, he meant to say it, but the words only echoed inside his head with the horrible realization that he could no longer command his own mouth to move. Archie could taste every atom, but he couldn’t make even a stray bit of hydrogen vibrate.

“I did and I didn’t,” replied the Other Archie, with Archie’s own mouth, as if to show off his new command of things. “Many times the host and the animus reach a comfortable power-sharing agreement. Sometimes they even fuse. You couldn’t separate Envy and Chic Cooper even with a scalpel. I’m told they’ve tried several times.”

 _This isn’t fair!_ Archie said, feeling pathetic even saying the words.

“No, it certainly is not,” Other Archie agreed. “But it is how these things go, so you’ll have to get used to me. Now, how do I start you going?”

All at once Archie dropped through the grey fog like a rock, accelerating downward into nothingness. It was a nightmare of falling, and it went on and on and on until it became boring, a windburned terrifying blah.

Until Archie woke up in the hospital, surrounded by doctors.

But the Archie who woke up at Riverdale General wasn’t like the Archie who’d gone to sleep at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next update, in which Veronica, Betty, Jughead, Jellybean, and a special guest star pursue an exciting new lead and wreak a major amount of havoc: 6/21/2019


	7. Hail to the King

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Veronica, Jughead, Betty, Kevin, and Jellybean meet the man behind all the other men behind all that's evil in Riverdale. And they discover exactly why Riverdale is what it is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter terrorized me beyond all reason until I produced.

Veronica was anxious. She didn’t allow it to become visible to the others, but she could feel the fear squirming in her gut, trying to gnaw its way out. She’d left a message for Reggie at the dead drop site the day before, and it was gone when she went to check in the morning, but here they were at the edge of Pickens Park, her, Betty, Jughead, and Jellybean huddled in the shadows, and Reggie still hadn’t showed.

            “Veronica, are you sure you remembered the time right?” Betty was whispering, but in the stillness of the park, she might as well have sung the question as an aria for how the sound carried in every direction.

            “Of course I remember! Veronica Lodge never forgets an appointment,” Veronica replied, indignant and louder than she’d meant to be, prompting Jughead to shush them both.

            “At least we know this isn’t an ambush, or they would have nabbed us already,” he whispered, peering around the bush that shielded them from the view of passing cars. Jughead looked up and back at Jellybean, who towered over them even crouching. “See anything, JB?”

            Veronica watched Jellybean’s eyes cycle kaleidoscopically through different colors, each indicating a different kind of visual sensor. Jellybean settled on a soft green and scanned the horizon. “I see someone approaching.” With the girl’s tinny monotone, it was hard to tell what she might feel, but Veronica thought she detected a note of apprehension in Jellybean’s voice.

            “Is it Reggie?” Veronica asked, looking up at Jellybean pleadingly. Jellybean shook her head.

            “Definitely not Reggie. Around the same height, but skinnier. Wearing a military uniform. Alone though.”

            Betty peeked over the bush, squinting into the darkness until she could make out the distant figure. “I think it’s Kevin. Look at how the moonlight catches his hair. He must use Heady Shoulders.”

            Jughead nodded. “Very glossy. That would point to Kevin. But what’s he doing here?” Jughead turned to Veronica. “Did you and Reggie work with Kevin? Was he a mole?”

            “No. Kevin was working for his dad last time I talked to him. Reggie and I were still deciding if we thought he was ready to be turned.”

            “Surprise, I guess I was!” said Kevin, looking over the bush at them. All of them jumped, Jellybean’s pistons shuddering as she tensed.

            “What are you doing here, Kevin?” asked Betty.

            “More importantly, were you followed?” said Jughead.

            Veronica shoved them both aside and stepped around the bush. “Most importantly, where’s Reggie?”

            Kevin gave them the tight-lipped smile he always deployed when the world was making unreasonable demands of him. “I think I can answer all of those questions, actually. I wasn’t followed. My dad thinks I’m out meeting a guy at Pop’s. I took a long route and doubled back twice, no one’s on my tail. As for Reggie…” Kevin’s frown deepened. “He contacted me a few nights back. Asked if I could get him into the night watch station. Said he’d trade a whole Farscape boxed set for it. So I let him in. He went straight to the basement, shoved around some shelves, and found a tunnel.”

            “A tunnel?” said Veronica, at the same time Betty and Jughead both said “A secret tunnel?”

            “Yes,” said Kevin, nodding. “A secret tunnel. I followed him down there, trying to get him to come back, but he wouldn’t listen. We wandered for a long time, and eventually we came into a really weird room. It was some kind of throne room or something, huge with a dome ceiling. Like something out of the Renaissance. There were transmutation circles all over the floor, and a man sitting on a dais at the center of the room. He didn’t look…he didn’t look right. He wasn’t- I don’t know, finished? He was blurry all over, and he had sticks and horns sprouting out of his back. Reggie tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t even look at us, and we got swarmed with soldiers. Reggie held them off and told me to run. Before they got him, he said I had to get this info to you.” Kevin fell silent, staring away into the darkness. Veronica stepped forward and hugged him tightly. Within the boundary of her arms, Kevin shook, each breath he took ragged and shallower than the last. Veronica felt a pressure on against her side and looked over to see Betty had joined them, her arm over Kevin’s shoulder and her torso squeezed against his to make up for her incomplete embrace.

            Lifting her gaze over Betty’s head, Veronica caught Jughead’s eye and raised her eyebrows. His expression slid seamlessly between irritation and longing two or three times in a single second, but the longing won out and he joined the hug, one arm over Kevin’s shoulders and the other over Betty’s.

            The four of them stayed like that for several more seconds before Kevin pulled away. His face was flushed and bright, and Veronica realized he’d been crying.

            “Thanks, guys,” said Kevin, scrubbing at his eyes with the back of his hand. “You’re almost as uplifting as an episode of Queer Eye.”

            “I do think we’re rather fab,” Veronica replied with a smile. But her gladness collapsed inward almost as quickly as it had been blossomed up. “Do you think Reggie’s at Sheriff Minetta’s office?”

            “No. My dad would know. For whatever reason, he’s out of the loop. They haven’t even come to arrest me yet. They must have Reggie stashed somewhere else.”

            “What about the North Side Academy?” suggested Jughead. “That’s where they keep Cheryl, Chuck, Midge, all the others. I’ve never seen anybody but the Red Circle go in and out of there.”

            Betty frowned. “That’s bad news for Reggie, though. We don’t have the peoplepower to stage a jailbreak any time soon.”

            “I’m sure Reggie’s already started on his Shawshank tunnel,” said Veronica, pressing all her anxieties about Reggie, about the torture he would undergo at the hands of her parents, about her complicity, into a lockbox buried deep inside her chest. “What we need to do is to decide our next move.”

            Betty and Jughead stared at her. “Isn’t it obvious?” said Jughead. “We go through this tunnel that Kevin found and figure out what’s up with this spooky, eldritch type that’s living in the basement.”

            “Are you kidding me?” said Veronica. “We can’t just go rushing into this place. Kevin said it was heavily guarded. Busting down doors without knowing what’s behind them is how you lost your arm, Betty!”

            “Oh gosh, Betty,” said Kevin, taking a step back, fully noticing her missing arm for the first time. “I really am not prepared for the constant barrage of things that happen to you. Please slow down the trauma.”

            “I wish I could, Kev,” said Betty, reaching up unconsciously to feel her truncated shoulder and pulling away just before her fingers made contact. “Anyway, Vee, we really don’t have another good option. We don’t have any other leads. We need some answers. And we’re not just Kevin and Reggie this time.” Kevin squinched his face up in feigned irritation and Betty laughed. “Not that you guys aren’t a powerful pairing in your own right. But we’ve got you with the flame alchemy, Veronica, Jug with regular alchemy, and JB, who’s literally a tank.”

            “I don’t really like that term,” said Jellybean, folding her arms across her chest with a hollow thud.

            “Oh. Sorry, Jellybean,” said Betty, reddening. “I just mean you’re about the toughest and most durable person in Riverdale.”

            “Well, yeah,” the girl replied, her eyes flicking from green to soft blue and back again to show there were no hard feelings.

            Jughead picked up where Betty left off. “We’re an elite crew, basically the Avengers of Riverdale. We can take some soldiers and a creepy druid cosplayer.”

            “And if somebody like Nick, Chic, or Penelope shows up?” said Veronica, arms folded with one hand in her pocket. She ran the flame alchemy gloves between her fingers. The roughness of them was reassuring, and the tips of her fingers tingled with a warmth that might have been friction, or might have been excitement at the thought of having a new enemy to try them out on.

            “From what Jug said about South Side Academy, it seems like they don’t want to kill us,” Jellybean said quietly. “So if we have to run, they won’t cut us down.”

            “Hoping our enemies won’t kill us when we give them an easy target is probably our worst plan yet,” Veronica responded, but she couldn’t hold back a smile, caving to the delicious temptation of heroism. Daring was what they did. No one else would or could. “But I’m in, as long as you promise it’ll be worth it, Kevin.”

            “Oh absolutely,” he said, “This place is wild. It’s like a cross between Notre Dame and Dexter’s Laboratory. I might not be one of the Core Four, but I think I have a pretty good sense of your taste in terrible, horrible things. You’ll like this.”

            And so it was decided. They followed Kevin out of the park and across town, keeping close to the shadows and avoiding any streets with people on them. Not that there were many. After sundown, Riverdale transformed into a ghost town so quickly you’d think people really were expecting ghosts, ghouls, or vampires to spring from the darkness. Reflexively, Veronica began to say something about how Riverdale was no New York, but she swallowed the thought just as quickly as it occurred to her. Reggie had been right. Veronica did not remember ever being in New York, ever living there and having her own haunts and hangouts and favorite places. She remembered other people being there, in movies and tv shows, books and comics. But every memory she’d acquired of the place wasn’t hers at all. Time in and time out, she slipped on the imaginary shoes of some fictional Manhattanite and told herself the experience belonged was her own, as real as milkshakes at Pop’s or Saturday afternoons at the swimming hole.

            It was a rather dizzying sensation, the dawning certainty that she’d filled her whole mind with false memories, founded on stories and abstractions. Veronica felt as if everything within her were false, a paper screen of unthinking reference and homage covering…nothing? She was nauseous just thinking about it. Now was not the time to nail down the parameters of her subjectivity, to try and weave certainty from the tangle of diffuse and chaotic thoughts she believed were her own, and real.

            Veronica’s fingertips itched as she ran them over the flame gloves again.

            The night watch station was dark and empty, though Kevin still insisted on going ahead and checking all the rooms before his friends followed him in. Much of the building looked nearly abandoned, piles of old furniture thickly coated in dust, light fixtures gaping and empty of bulbs, and towers of bankers’ boxes overflowing with crumpled paperwork bearing Kevin’s dad’s heavy, angular handwriting.

            Kevin shoved a few boxes to the side as he led them down the hallway towards the back of the building. “Sorry about the mess. Ever since my dad got shoved over to night watch to make room for Minetta as sheriff, our operating budget has plummeted like Wile E. Coyote off the edge of a cliff. I’m pretty much the only one doing any admin or even cleaning around here.”

            Jughead lifted the lid off one of the boxes and flicked through the pages inside. “Are these all of your dad’s records from when he was sheriff?”

            “Probably,” said Kevin, shrugging with absolute disinterest. “He kept everything when he was sheriff, and even after they moved the sheriff’s office to City Hall, they didn’t take anything but the desk and the uniform off my dad’s back.”

            Betty joined Jughead by the box, examining more of the papers. “So all the arrests your dad carried out, everything he did as sheriff is on record here.” She looked over at Jughead. “There’s a lot we could learn from this.”

            Dust from the old documents coated Veronica’s throat and nose with every intake of breath. She coughed delicately. “Friends, now’s not really the time, though.”

            Jughead held up a hand to silence her, and the heat of indignation rushed through Veronica’s veins. “Jughead, if you think-“

            Betty insinuated herself between them. “Just give us a second, Vee.” She put her hand on Veronica’s arm and squeezed imploringly. Veronica folded her arms and took one small step back before her imperious rage collapsed under the force of a tremendous sneeze. Nose cold and itchy, Veronica glared at Jughead’s oblivious face as he scanned the sheriff’s records, Betty peeking over his shoulder.

            “What did you find, Jughead?” Betty asked, her hand now resting on Jughead’s shoulder, trying to break into his field of attention, always a difficult prospect.

            “It’s strange…Let me look at one more…” said Jughead vaguely, his voice coming from a long way away.

            Veronica looked from Kevin, who was rolling an old pencil back and forth across the floor with the tip of his toe, to Jellybean, who hunched just a few inches below the ceiling, forced to fend off an apparently endless gauntlet of cobwebs and spiders dripping down from above her.

            “Kevin, JB, why don’t the three of us go ahead to the basement and find Reggie’s tunnel while Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boy finish up their impromptu investigation?” said Veronica, not bothering to hide the irritation in her voice. First, they insist on the most ridiculous and dangerous course of action ever, then they get distracted with bits of paper before the mission could actually even begin. Much as she did love Betty and fondly tolerate Jughead, together they became a beast whose obsession with tangential investigation often became a real pain in the ass.

            Betty glanced up at Veronica and smiled nervously, her lips pressed thin and white. “That’s a good idea. We’ll be down in a second.”

            Veronica needed no further prompting, and turned on her heel, waving for Kevin and Jellybean to follow her. The door to the basement stood at the end of the hall, and hung open just a few inches, space enough to allow a menacing darkness to radiate forth from the gap. The darkness was rich, not flat black or even grey, but layered and reddish, not the absence of light but the presence of a living un-light, a waking darkness.

            “Is there, like, a light switch, Kevin? Or do we just wander straight into the jaws of Jason, Freddy, or whoever else is waiting down there?” Veronica asked, touching the doorknob with just a fingertip. She recoiled as soon as she brushed the knob’s brassy surface. It was shockingly, witheringly cold.

            “There is a light switch,” Kevin said brightly. “But it’s at the bottom of the stairs.”

            Jellybean let out a crackling sigh and reached over them both to push open the door. “I can’t believe two teenagers are scared to go into a dark basement.” Her eyes shifted to a yellow tinge and became two bright flashlight beams, shining the way down the basement stairs.

            “Okay, Jellybean, you might be effectively indestructible,” said Veronica, following the little girl down the stairs, feeling the steps tremble each time Jellybean set down a heavy foot. “But Kevin and I still remember being menaced by the Black Hood-“

            “Not to mention Sweetwater,” added Kevin.

            “Not to mention the bread riots before Sweetwater.”

            “And the Serpent uprising before that.”

            “The swamp things before that.”

            “Oh, you know, I forgot about that,” Kevin said. Kevin’s voice was stifled and quiet, and Veronica glanced back to see his knuckles clenched white around the railing of the stairs. She suspected he had not forgotten at all.

            “Alright, I get it,” said Jellybean, taking a final thudding step onto the basement floor and scanning the area around the stairs with her flashlight. There was nothing to be seen but debris and dust. “Awful things are always happening in Riverdale, especially when the lux measurements get below 0.001.”

            “You mean when it gets dark, right?” said Veronica, picking her way around Jellybean to the right side of the basement, scanning the shelves and scattered knick knacks for some evidence of secrets, tunnels, or Reggie.

            “Yeah, no need to flex, Jellybean,” Kevin said, standing on the last step and smiling wryly up at Jellybean. “You proved you’re braver than either of us just now, we already know you’re smarter too.”

            Jellybean’s eyes flickered blue for just a second, bathing them all in an eerie, watery wash. Then she looked away, her eyes projecting bright gold light once again. “Where was it you and Reggie found the tunnel, Kevin?”

            He pointed off into the darkness, then leaned over and flipped a small switch beside the stairs. With a strained whir and pop, two rows of fluorescent lights flickered into existence on either side of stairs, displaying a pile of detritus even greater than the stacks and towers upstairs. Shelves leaned wildly and collapsed onto each other, boxes were overturned and their contents vomited across the floor, everything was chaos. Veronica was certain she saw several rodent-y shapes slither out of sight as the lights came on.

            “Reminds me of home,” said Jellybean, and this time the sadness was impossible to miss.

            “Serpent Camp?” asked Veronica, picking her way over to where Kevin and Jellybean stood.

            “No.” The pause between that first word and the rest of Jellybean’s statement was so long that Veronica worried the girl’s processor had frozen up. “It reminds me of our old place in Sunny Side Trailer Park. Before the evictions.”

            Kevin pressed forward into the debris, tracing the recently cleared path left by Reggie’s own search, but Veronica remained beside Jellybean. There was a sliver of vulnerability in what the little girl had just said, and Veronica couldn’t not pounce. “What was that like, Jellybean? The evictions?”

            “It was scary,” Jellybean said, so softly Veronica stretched on her tippy-toes to hear Jellybean’s whisper. “The Red Circle busting down doors and demanding everybody living there leave. We didn’t know where we could go or what we would do. Our dad was already gone. And when our mom wouldn’t do what they said, they hauled her off. They told us later she was dead. After Sweetwater, they told us we messed up our bodies trying to bring her back with alchemy. But we don’t know. The last time I saw her was in that trailer. I don’t even remember the last thing she said to me.”

            “That sounds like a real torture sesh, JB,” said Veronica. “You and Jughead both were really brave to have made it through that.”

            “Well, we didn’t do it alone. Archie and his dad let us stay with them for months until a South Side family offered to take us in. We wouldn’t have made it without the Andrews.”

            Veronica felt a little bolt in her chest spin into place tighter and tighter, building up steady pressure in her heart until it was certainly about to burst. “Yeah. Mr. Andrews was a great guy. I thought Archie-kins was too, until I finally had to face up to the ugly truth.”

            Jellybean laid one huge arm over Veronica’s shoulders. It was surprisingly light, and Veronica sensed only the barest impression of it, which was more than enough.

            From behind them, she heard Betty and Jughead come down the stairs. She always recognized the sound of their footsteps, but the familiar patterns were especially distinctive on the stairs. Betty’s footsteps were light and even until she got close to the bottom, and excitement doubled her pace. Jughead’s footsteps were uneven in force, one much heavier than the other, but their rhythm was steady. He knew where he was going, or at least thought he did.

Veronica wondered if anyone attended to her footsteps, and what they noticed about her from listening. Suddenly remorse for her earlier irritation surged forth, forcing open the entrance to her heart that the mention of Archie had sealed up. She ducked out from under Jellybean’s arm and turned to her friends, smiling. “Find what you were looking for?”

Betty’s face was wrinkled with frown lines and Jughead’s expression had a practiced nonchalance betrayed by wide, round eyes afraid to admit their real concern. So Veronica suspected that they had indeed found what they sought.

“Well, it’s not so much what we found as what we didn’t,” said Betty. “Sheriff Keller never wrote down a single year on his police reports.”

“Not only that,” Jughead added, “Where the dates should be is some kind of single- and double-digit code. It looks like a date, but the numbers have obviously been replaced with a substitute.”

“What makes you say that?” asked Veronica.

From the far back wall of the basement, Kevin cried out, first a yelp of shock and fear, then a shout of certainty and satisfaction. “I found it, guys! And it’s just as creepy as I remember! Almost as creepy as Dilton Doiley’s sex bunker!”

As one Veronica, Jughead, Jellybean, and Betty turned and went to Kevin. But as they skittered around collapsing shelves, Jughead leaned over to Veronica and said quietly “I know Sheriff Keller wrote the years in code because we’re pretty far off from Year One or Year Two. They’re stand-ins for some other number, they have to be.”

“Maybe he was counting off from his first year as sheriff.”

“Maybe,” Jughead said, but the way his eyes narrowed as he spoke suggested he was unconvinced.

At the basement wall, Kevin stood looking terribly pleased with himself, beside a dark cutout of missing wall space, a place where someone had apparently come through with anti-matter and flushed a bit of the basement away, opening it onto pure absence. They all five peered into the hole, Jellybean cycling through her various types of vision.

“What do you see down there, JB?” asked Jughead.

“It’s a tunnel, just like Kevin said. It slopes down a little way, and then turns out of sight.” Jellybean’s eyes shifted once more, back to the yellow flashlights, lighting up exactly what she’d just described.

“Kevin, do you think you can find your way back to the throne room you told us about?” said Veronica, stepping back from the hole to gather her thoughts. Something was awfully precipitous about the hole in the wall. It reminded her of the entrance to Wonderland, or maybe more like Tartarus. Pass through the portal and arrive in another world, one beyond your comprehension or preparation. A crucible of body and soul, burning together in a state of unbearable heat, even in the absolute darkness.

“But I’ve survived the Black Friday Glamazon Rush, I can survive anything.” The words slipped out of Veronica’s mouth leaden and slimy, not at all as she’d intended, a fiery statement of glamorous intention. Everyone was watching her, and they all looked absurdly concerned. “Sorry. Got a little excited. You know how hard it is to resist quipping and monologuing, even this early in the adventure.”

Jughead nodded slowly, eyes on the floor and mouth pressed thin. When he did look up, Veronica realized he was laughing. “The Glamazon Black Friday Sale? That’s the scariest unknown you’ve ever leapt into?”

Veronica considered being angry, but there was a warmth to Jughead’s tone that surprised her. He was smiling, all the fossilized torment of his face breaking up for a moment to accommodate the comfort of a friend you know well acting exactly as they would. Veronica smiled back.

“Well, you know, turning on my parents and burning down the Five Seasons was a close second, but I had a suspicion of how that would turn out. On Black Friday every single victory was hard-won.”

Betty smiled too. “But I’m sure you found victory in the end. We could use some of that heroic energy tonight.”

“Then we’ll have to follow my Black Friday strategy guide to the letter,” said Veronica, stepping through the hole and into the tunnel. Nothing was different on the other side, or so she thought. “Rule #1: Always Press Onward, Never Retreat. Those Pravda knee highs I love so much were almost out of stock when I nabbed the last pair. Without that snap decision-making, I might have let them slip between my fingers.”

“We’ll have to follow your example, then,” said Betty, ducking into the tunnel alongside her, followed by Kevin, and then Jellybean, folding in on herself like the foundation of her heavy metal shell had finally given way.

Veronica turned to Jughead, about to ask him if she should go first, but the expression on his face was so exhausted and sad that she forgot what she was about to say. Beneath the sardonic, self-aggrandizing, instinctive sarcasm and silliness of Jughead lay undiluted misery, worn down to a cold, hard nub. It was all written there on his face, and it was much more than Veronica had ever wished to know him. Seeing Jughead this way was not like the appealing vulnerability of Jellybean revealing a bit of the Jones’ past, another bundle of fact and feeling for Veronica to gather up and add to her collection. It was a violation, a taste so bitter and long fermented that Veronica wanted to spit, to rinse her mouth with saltwater and a swig of rosé, eat an entire bowl of breath mints, anything to relieve her of this visceral knowledge of the ache that lived behind the act of jokey, jerky Jughead, the same way all the nothing lived behind the act of jet-setting, iconic heiress Veronica.

“Jug?” Betty was leaning back out of the tunnel entrance, confused and more than a little concerned. “Veronica? Are you guys coming?”

Jughead returned to the land of the living like a time lapse video of a flower blossoming, his soul spreading back out through his body in a jerky, fluid way almost too quick to see. “Sorry, Betty. Just got lost in thought there. We don’t want to walk into a possible fight with no quips prepared.”

“I was just going to stick with the usual ‘It’s over, dirtbag!’” said Betty, miming holding an imaginary villain at gunpoint. “We don’t know what this guy’s deal is yet. Bespoke quips are the best.”

“A person of true taste and distinction never goes anywhere unprepared,” Veronica interjected, glad to be able to partake in the mental mouthwash of stupid conversation and forget what she’d seen in Jughead’s face. “A tailored ensemble is the only way to go. But even a style icon sometimes has to turn to the rack in emergencies. The Nornstrom Rack, of course.”

“Of course,” said Betty, laughing, and Veronica knew without needing any confirmation that Betty had never seen any Nornstrom clothing, never seen the label, never been inside a Nornstrom Rack, let alone an actual Nornstrom store. The more Veronica thought about it, the more she wasn’t sure she’d been either. She couldn’t even picture the sign clearly. She recognized the type, the logo, but something about it was off. She wondered if she was going aphasic at the ripe old age of seventeen, and soon she’d be spouting malapropisms and nonsense in place of references and quips.

The two modes aren’t so different, Veronica thought bitterly as she followed Betty and then Jughead into the tunnel. Kevin and Jellybean waited just where the floor began to slope downward, Jellybean’s eyelights pointing the way forward, deeper under Riverdale.

They pushed on without discussion, moving into the tunnel system. Kevin showed the way, and Jellybean towered over the rest of them, lighting the next few meters of tunnel ahead. That was how they traveled for at least an hour, only four or five steps visible at a time, stopping every so often to allow Kevin to assess a bit of wall or ground, recognizing a little knick in the rocks or the imprint of Reggie’s bootheel in the dirty ground. The tunnel twisted round and round fractally, and Veronica worried they were spiraling in on themselves, that soon the tunnel would push through an earlier segment and they’d pleach into the past. She’d see herself from an hour ago staring up out of the gloom.

Veronica reassured herself that that was an unreasonable anxiety. There were better things to be worried about, like the likelihood she, Betty, Jughead, Jellybean, and Kevin would all be killed as soon as they found this spooky being and his spooky villain lair. Buried in the same lockbox where she’d sealed away her fears about Reggie, Veronica had also hidden the absurd and idiotic hope that confronting this obviously evil denizen of the depths would somehow absolve her parents of everything they’d done. That the real bad guy had been threatening her or the town or the world, and forced the Lodges into every awful act of violence and suppression committed during her mother’s tenure as Fuhrer of Riverdale. That idea was such pure, undiluted nonsense you could probably get Jingle Jangle off it, but she couldn’t get rid of the hope coiled in her stomach like a snake, waiting to strike her with such crushing and irremediable disappointment that Veronica imagined all her bones would turn to jelly. She would dissolve and roll down the drain.

Until then, though, Veronica could keep extracting elicit delight from the idea. Love, uncompromised. Something she no longer had any of, now that Archie was gone too.

A few meters farther down the tunnel Kevin held up a hand, and the other four stopped, looking to him for an explanation. Kevin pointed ahead and up, Jellybean’s eyelights following the arc of his gesture and illuminating a towering pair of stone doors, eight meters high and covered with twisting carvings. Round and round, spiraling like the tunnel, were snakes, each one swallowing its own tail. And in the snakes’ coils, their tiny stone faces more expressive and agonized than they had any right to be, were little people, eternally suffocating in a reptilian embrace. One of the faces, not so high off the ground, caught Veronica’s eye and she pushed past Kevin to reach up and brush the cool, grey figure with her hand. The contours were painfully familiar, the round face twisted in agony and the big eyes bursting free of their sockets in a horrible, desperate demand for air. It was her face, Veronica in the armless squeeze of a great serpent, seconds away from falling behind death’s black curtain.

Veronica stumbled back, hand burning with cold and terror where she’d touched her own effigy. The door rumbled and a shower of dust cascaded off the massive hinges framing the twin scenes of torture.

“I have a bad feeling about this,” said Jughead.

“I don’t remember the last time I had a good feeling about something,” Betty replied.

Kevin backed away from the door, he and Veronica both returning to a comfortingly close proximity with their friends, shielded within Jellybean’s ring of light.

“Guys, I don’t want to bump up the terror quotient any higher, but I think you should know this did not happen last time!” Kevin said, fumbling with the holster on his belt, his fingers slipping on the well-oiled leather.

A chink opened between the doors, and a blinding and all-consuming darkness spilled out, slithering towards the boundary of Jellybean’s eyelights. Without thinking, Veronica, Kevin, Jughead, and Betty all took a step back, not allowing the willful blot of nothing to grasp even at their toes.

“How did you and Reggie get in last time if this didn’t happen?” asked Veronica. She held the flame gloves in one hand, but she wavered. Would whatever was behind those doors even burn?

“The door was already open! And it definitely wasn’t this dark!” Kevin answered, pistol now in hand and pointed out towards the unknown, unseen, possibly non-existent enemy.

With a mind-numbing and bone-shaking crash, the two huge doors crashed open, slamming the wall on either side with the force of an earthquake. The tendrils of darkness came spilling out, a sea solely composed of cephalopods, and hungry, fearless ones at that. A tidal wave of not-ness massed above the little quintet. Veronica thought the wave paused for a second longer than made sense, long enough for a great white eye to open in the wave’s heart, the red iris burning bright and bloody against the stark colorless sclera, both glowing forth from the absolute absence around them.

The wave crashed down upon them, obliterating Jellybean’s sacred circle of light. Veronica could see nothing. The darkness was so intense it was a physical weight pressing the air from her lungs. When she did manage to inhale, the air tasted dry and musty in a way that reminded her of old clothes and the least tended shelves of the library. The air congealed in her chest and she struggled to force it out and take another breath. Veronica’s feet left the floor of their own accord, floating free in the newly annihilated world. With a heart-stopping rush, she felt a current in the dark sea catch her and yank her forward. She spread her arms wide, hoping to catch hold of the doorway or one of her friends, but only cold, empty air ran through her fingers. The tide dragged Veronica into the next room even as she writhed and struggled. The experience was not at all like swimming against a current in the river or the swimming hole. It was like facing an unbreakable, alien will in psychic combat and losing. It was like arguing with her father.

Veronica hit the ground hard, slamming down knees first on hard, smooth stone. She squeezed her hand tight around the gloves, stuffing every fingertip and fold into her fist until they were completely hidden. From somewhere to the right, she heard a Betty-ish yelp and then the clatter and clang that meant Jughead and Jellybean had made landfall. Over on her left, surprisingly close, a very Kevin-like sigh floated out of the darkness.

“I think we got swallowed by Riverdale’s Hell-Mouth.”

“I couldn’t have said it better myself, Kevin.” The voice was bright and friendly, emanating forth from somewhere in front of them. Veronica could almost see the words glowing white in the dull dark, so lively and in such good cheer that they cut through the lightless fishbowl she and her friends now occupied.

Soft steps drew nearer to Veronica, the careful, deliberate sound suggesting someone who knew their way around and also appreciated a pair of very good shoes. “Pride?” The sound was directed, pointed in a way that made Veronica think Pride was a person, not a concept. “Can we bring down the dark a bit? It’s about time I introduced myself.”

The lightless world collapsed into itself, striations of black nothingness falling away and away and away behind Veronica. Light sawed into her eyes. The last remaining tendrils of darkness slithered over her shoulders and down her arms. Veronica cringed, trying to pull away from their clammy touch, but the tendrils had worse things in mind. A loop of solid nothingness slid around her wrists and another around her ankles, both weighing her down like iron shackles. Veronica’s hands and feet were pinned to the floor, knees already aching and shoulders yanked back. She glanced to either side and saw Kevin, Betty, Jughead, and Jellybean in a similar state, all forced to kneel before a great white stone dais.

The edge of the dais was not far from Veronica’s face, and she noted the marble was the same as the countertops in Pembrooke House: Cefaratti White, the best and most expensive option available from Riverdale Tile & Counter. At its very edge, closest to Veronica, stood a person—or an outline of a person. Veronica’s immediate instinct was to identify the person as a businessman, or one of her father’s associates (a “businessman”), but the longer she looked, the less sure she was about calling the blurry shape anything. It was person-like, person-adjacent, but it had been colored in poorly, and what should have been bound in a taut container of human skin instead bled out into the air. The person wore a satiny red Armondi suit and shiny calf brown loafers, and all that made sense to Veronica. That was something she could memorize and assess as easily as multiplication facts, but whenever she tried to take a good, long look at the person’s face, her eyes flicked away. Every time she tried to look, her body rebelled, her eyes rolled, her neck twitched, she wobbled until she nearly fell over. Veronica could not look. All she saw was a smear instead of a face, an impressionistic blur, a half-erased sketch. And behind it a spreading, blossoming tangle of branches and twigs, sprouting from the person’s back like spiky fingers.

Briefly, Veronica marveled at how a mere grey-brown slash of a mouth could convey so much hunger and malice at once. The spiny wings did add a certain Balrogian menace.

The being dropped to its knees, forcing its face-if-it-could-be-called-a-face directly into Veronica’s sightline. Her eyes tried to roll away in two different directions and her head threatened to tear in half. The melted ice cream swirl of a face before her split into an uncomfortably toothy grin and the perfectly dressed body before her shook with barely suppressed giggles, rocking the hunched and gargoyle-like body back and forth at the dais’s edge.

“I am so glad to finally meet you, Veronica. For a king, I am sadly very disconnected from my subjects. It weights heavy on me, I assure you.” The being’s voice was still so friendly and cheerful, so without malice that Veronica was certain reality was dissolving, or at least her brain was.

The being rose, smoothing out the wrinkles in its suit, and strolled along the dais’s edge, pausing to lean close to Jughead and Betty the same way it had menaced Veronica. Veronica discovered she could watch the being out of the corner of her eye, but immediately regretted learning this as she watched it snuffle her friends, smeary face inches from their own.

The being retreated a meter or two, taking up a more central place on the dais, and surveyed its captives, blobby eyes crawling over them so attentively that it felt like a physical violation. “Let me congratulate you all on reaching my sanctum. You in particular, Kevin, for managing it twice. As you may have guessed, I am the mysterious and terrible Gargoyle King. You may also call me Your Majesty, Our Father, or He. But please don’t neglect to capitalize all those titles.”

Veronica burst into wild laughter, doubling over, yanking against the shadows restraining her. It was absurd that such a misshapen and unlikely creature should speak with a more cultivated diction than Nick St. Clair. Than Veronica herself. Veronica laughed until tears streamed from her eyes and her jaw ached.

“Veronica, call for you from the Joker. He says he wants his laugh back,” Kevin said, sotto voce, whispering so everyone could hear. He was still performing the prom queen school princess and gay best friend routine, and Veronica found that even funnier than the Gargoyle King and His absurd prep school tones. She tried to suppress the mad giggles, but they crawled out of her and bounced off the grand curves of the throne room until they became a resounding and demented chorus.

The acoustics of that laughter made Veronica curious enough to take better stock of her surroundings, even from her cramped and bound position. It really was just as Kevin described: a throne room, sure, with a great throne set far back on the stone dais, but it most strongly resembled a cathedral designed by a mad scientist. The ceiling soared above them, disappearing from sight long before a solid ceiling was ever visible, and the thick buttressed walls sported great metal gears, a quiet but unrelenting churn of motion and sound. The gears chugged along with an energetic sprightliness that echoed the Gargoyle King’s own cheerful voice.

“Veronica Lodge and the edge of reason!” The Gargoyle King stood close before her again, the long, pointed toes of His shoes only centimeters from her face. Veronica cocked her head so she could peer up at Him from the corner of her eye. The cut of His suit was flawless close up, better than anything Riverdale Prom & Wedding had ever provided her. The effect was spoiled by the face, which at this angle resembled nothing so much as a bloody cow’s head, and the wings, which spread like the branches of a long dead tree to shade them both within an unholy radius. The wings reminded Veronica of a particularly chaotic screensaver, the spiky limbs branching and splitting and extending to fill her whole field of vision, falling back suddenly, and then beginning again.

The King was still speaking, though the words were rolling into and out of Veronica’s ears like a steady tide over an obstinate rock. She tuned back in, though, when He stepped back and waved a hand over the five captives, including them all in some blanket statement He’d made while her attention was elsewhere.

“I ought to be annoyed you’ve all found your way down here, as you’ll be twice the usual nuisance now that you know Riverdale’s more important than you ever dreamed. But I can’t help but be impressed. I placed so many stumbling blocks in your way. I designed you to be so tortured and troubled that I’m surprised you can even function.”

“Designed? What the hell does that mean?” Jughead tried to shout this as an unflinching, reporterly demand, but the shadow binding his wrists and ankles whipped upward as he tried to speak, sending Jughead tumbling sideways. The question came out as a garbled stutter.

The King laughed, and the fuzzy-edged, long-toothed mouth on His face split wide. “I own Riverdale, Jughead. I arrange you all how I like. Everything that has ever happened to you happened for a reason. That reason was that I demanded it.”

“Why?” Betty asked this more as a cry than a question, and Veronica looked over to see her friend straining against her shadow bonds. Their captor hadn’t bothered to restrain Betty’s single arm, and she was trying to push herself to her feet, even as the shadows twisted her feet out from under her.

The Gargoyle King leaned forward and His wings soared up and up and up into the vaulted ceiling, folding down over them all as if they were buried together under the roots of an ancient, knotty tree. “Because I eat pain, Betty. I revel in the taste of suffering, and I find the suffering of attractive, charismatic young people the most appetizing. Every awful thing that has happened to you and your friends was a feast to me. In fact,” and here He paused to sniff the air, breathing deeply. “In fact, you are nearly overripe, Betty. The loss of that arm sunk some scars into your psyche, didn’t it? And of course learning your brother is one of my homunculi couldn’t have been easy.”

Betty’s face was cloudy with pain and confusion, and sure enough the Gargoyle King seemed to broaden with every tear that took shape on Betty’s eyelids. Rage crawled up the back of Veronica’s neck and settled itself over her brain, a red scrim of hatred for the monster lording Himself over them. She threw herself forward, slamming her chest against the dais with a hearty and painful thud that drew the Gargoyle King to her in two steps. He came as metal to a magnet. He couldn’t resist. Veronica collapsed against the floor in front of the dais, shadow bonds still dragging her down, and the wind knocked out of her.

“Don’t do anything you’ll regret, Veronica. I need you and your friends alive for Ascension Day,” He said, staring down at her. The unfettered appetite visible even on the King’s rough face was obscene.

From her sprawl on the floor, Veronica glared up at the King, even as her eyes streamed and her head threatened to split. “What are homunculi?”

“Oh, I see! You’re jealous of Betty having such an important brother. Classic B & V. Well, don’t you worry. All of you have a lucky friend or relation who’s been in on this from the start.” Veronica pressed every part of her brain into service trying not to tune out this longwinded blather. She tried to imagine how Betty and Jughead were listening right now, and she sifted desperately for clues.

The Gargoyle King’s focus on His own speech was evidently limitless, as he paced around the dais, still pronouncing on the subject of homunculi. “My loyal servants, my children, each one intended to promulgate a certain type of transgression and cruelty in Riverdale, to finetune your pain and sorrow. Most of them are off on missions at the moment, but you’ve already become intimately familiar with Pride’s special skills.” The King gestured to someone on the far side of the room, and Veronica felt the shadow shackles shift.

A black blot slid across the floor between her and Betty, amorphous but sprouting tendrils which led back to each of the captured teens and formed their bonds. The blot slithered over the lip of the dais and swirled upwards into a dark column beside the Gargoyle King. The column began to resolve itself into a humanoid form. At the silhouette alone, Veronica felt the snake of terrible disappointment sink its fangs into her heart. It was already so clearly her father. All the care and love he’d invested in Veronica, all the days he’d asked after her and the gifts he’d given her, they’d all already been tainted by the cruel things he and her mother had done as First Husband and Fuhrer. This was worse. This was worse because now Veronica knew even the love of her wasn’t real. That had been cruelty too, a set of actions designed to prolong her time as the Gargoyle King’s feedbag of misery.

The column began to resemble a wax figure, then a molten plastic statue, and then finally a flesh and blood man. It was her father, broad-shouldered and besuited as ever, tendrils still stretching forth from his body to hold all the captives in their places. Veronica was not able to laugh now, and she tore at herself internally, fighting the urge to cry.

“Mija,” her father said, smiling the same as ever, as if this world had not just been proven to be the worst of all possible worlds. “I know this is confusing. Your mother and I made a choice when we were very young, long before you were born. We’re Lodges, and we live by our word. When the King offered us this power and position, we had to accept. You’ll understand someday.”

“I really don’t think I will, Daddy,” she spat back, twisting inside at the confirmation that her mother too was one of the Gargoyle King’s strange servants. She was angry, but the anger was already falling in on itself, turning into sludgy exhaustion and sadness. As Veronica noticed this change within herself, she noticed also that the Gargoyle King began to glow from within. It was an eerie effect, a cool greenish glow coalescing around His chest. He really was feeding off of her pain. It was His life, and seeing this so clearly displayed resurrected Veronica’s anger with a new force.

The Gargoyle King hummed a jaunty tune as He swallowed Veronica’s betrayal. “Ah, that went just as I’d planned. Thank you, Pride.” Hiram merely nodded in response, but it was so deferential, servile, that Veronica felt her own wave of wounded pride at seeing her father made subordinate.

“Now, you may not believe me when I say this, children,” said the King. “But I’m going to let you go now.”

“Like the pulp villain you are,” said Jughead.

“Oh, Jughead. What a snappy fellow you are. If only your mother were here to appreciate you with me. Or even your father, I suppose. I think I left him down here somewhere.”

“What do you mean? Where’s our dad?” Jellybean said, straining against Hiram’s tentacular grip.

The Gargoyle King shrugged and waved vaguely to a tunnel on the far right of the room. “If I remember rightly, he’s still in the dungeon. But I don’t know who’s been feeding him recently.”

That was all Jughead apparently needed to hear. He pressed his fingertips together and Veronica realized what he was about to do. Jughead pulled his fingertips apart, blue alchemical sparks flying between them, and grabbed the shadow tendril binding his ankles. It transmuted into fine powder, and as it dissolved, Hiram doubled over in pain. The tendrils holding Veronica in place flickered as her father lost his concentration, and Veronica tore through them without hesitation. She finally uncurled her aching fist and withdrew her gloves. It was a relief to feel them back on her hands.

Around her, the others had also broken their bonds and were clambering to their feet. Hiram Lodge was breathing hard, and where the tendrils had sprouted forth from his body, he now sported gaping holes leaking thick black fluid. The Gargoyle King paced the dais, radiating irritation. “Children, this is not how I’d hoped this exchange would go. I can’t kill most of you, unfortunately, at least not until Ascension Day, but I will have to punish you.” He waved to Hiram. “Pride, kill Kevin.”

Veronica had learned from their encounter with the great black wave. Specifically, she had learned not to hesitate. She let herself feel out into the air between her and her father, and then she snapped.

The dais went up in a billowing conflagration, big enough to swallow her father and the Gargoyle King both. Veronica knew her eyebrows would be ruined, if not completely erased, but she tried to focus on the positive, which was Kevin beside her, still alive. Veronica grabbed his hand and ran. Jughead, Betty, and Jellybean were already making for the tunnel on the right side of the throne room, the one the King had claimed held FP Jones. As soon as they were under the arch of the tunnel entrance, Jughead and Jellybean slammed their hands against the floor and sent a meter-thick barrier rising up from the ground, sealing the tunnel.

“I doubt that will hold them for long,” said Betty. “We need to move, and fast.”

“Especially if we’re going to rescue our dad,” Jellybean added, Jughead nodding along.

Kevin was already several meters ahead of the rest of them, shifting impatiently from foot to foot. “As the most ‘disposable’ member of the group, I vote we get going! Please!”

Already Veronica could hear something chipping away at Jughead and Jellybean’s barrier, and so she took Kevin up on his suggestion.

They ran through another series of spiraling tunnels, this time with the distinct feeling of spinning up and up, trapped in a whirling tornado with no sense of where they would emerge at the end. And close on their heels, they could hear ten or twenty Red Circle officers following them, always only one bend behind.

The tunnel ended abruptly in a large, dark room, lined with cells. On the far side of the room was a small door, leading out who knew where. Veronica assumed this was the dungeon.

“Jughead, Jellybean, see if your dad’s in here. And if not, we leave. We don’t have time to waste,” Veronica said, turning back the way they had come, shifting into her steadiest stance.

“What’s the plan here, Vee?” said Betty, standing beside Veronica at the mouth of the tunnel as they listened to the Red Circle soldiers drawing nearer.

“The same as every one before it, I think.” Veronica built a bridge of oxygen atoms, starting at her fingertips, and winding down the tunnel to where she imagined the Red Circle soldiers would soon be. The transmutation circles on her gloves grew hot with the energy expended to string this thread between her and her enemies.

Behind her, in the dungeon, Veronica heard a shout, somewhere between delight and terror. Betty disappeared to the source of the sound. Veronica stood alone at the mouth of the tunnel.

She snapped. The coils of flame sang as they boiled out of her fingertips and down the tunnel. The air burnt so loudly she almost didn’t hear the terrible screams as fire met flesh somewhere around the next bend of the tunnel.

Veronica turned away and went to her friends, who were clustered by the door while Jughead transmuted the heavy metal lock. Jellybean was carrying a dirty, disheveled man in her arms. He was so wild and mangy that Veronica couldn’t have guessed his age if she hadn’t known he was Jughead’s dad. They had the same eyes, though, and this man, FP Jones, stared up at her with the same bright, inquisitive, suspicious gaze.

Blue sparks bounced from Jughead’s hands into the lock, and it melted like a Dali clock. Kevin kicked open the door and led them out, mercifully out, up a set of damp concrete stairs and back into the real, familiar world.

Veronica took a deep breath, enjoying the fresh, crisp air. The group had emerged on a ridge, just off the north mountain road. Above and behind them were the towering pines of Old Fox Forest. Beyond the ridge, in Sweetwater Valley sat Riverdale, glowing with soft arcs of yellow, pink, and blue light. For a moment, no one could bear to move. From far away, it looked like the place it was supposed to be: an idyllic, welcoming, happy small town.

“Now you know the truth.” The voice was not familiar to Veronica, and weathered and cracked by deprivation, so she knew it must be FP. “Riverdale is a lie. It’s a factory farm for pain, a monument to the eldritch hunger of a monster living beneath our feet. The King controls everything. He always has. We’re all his puppets, dancing on the end of his strings.”

Right on cue, as if this knowledge had provoked a physical change in Veronica’s sight, Riverdale flickered. Not just the lights flickered, but the whole town flickered in and out of existence, leaving behind a blank, empty place. It was like a black hole, sucking everything down into its crushing center, and bending it into non-Euclidean shapes so alien and mind-distending that all good things, friendship, loyalty, love, hope, all became twisted, unrecognizable, and ruined. All that was left was the emptiness, the misery, and the sorrow. The food of the Gargoyle King, boiling away in some eldritch pressure cooker until Ascension Day, whatever that was.

Riverdale returned to its solid self, bright and shiny as if it had never been otherwise, but in her mind’s eye, Veronica still saw the canker at its heart, and she was sure now she always would.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> END OF ACT I
> 
> I'll be away from my writing facilities for the next few weeks, so I don't have an exact date for the next chapter, but I hope to provide it before the end of July.


	8. Unfortunately, Answers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jughead, Betty, Veronica, and Kevin finally get answers from FP Jones about the true nature of Riverdale. This proves to be almost more distressing than life without answers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As promised, just in time, an update before the end of the month! Though it is a weird one, so prepare yourselves.

Responsible and reliable as ever, Kevin was the one who found them a new hideout. His dad owned a hunting cabin in Old Fox Forest, and Kevin swore up and down that nobody else knew where it was. He led the way up the mountainside, following a thin and thoroughly overgrown path, which wound between the trees like a coiling snake. The serpentine similarity was almost comforting to Jughead, until he remembered that the real owner of the Serpents, the man who'd created the gang Jughead ostensibly led, was resting there in Jellybean's arms, emaciated and grey-skinned and too weak even to be angry.

  
Jughead wasn't sure why he was afraid of his father. That is to say, Jughead knew exactly why he was afraid of his father, an entire childhood’s worth of alcoholic bullying being the centerpiece, but Jughead didn't understand why he was still so terrified of his father, of the prospect of being near him, of the two of them caught in conversation, of FP asking him “how he was doing" or “what he'd been up to". Jughead wanted to cut his father off before he could speak, ask about the Gargoyle King and the mad magic shadows that lived in Hiram Lodge and the flickering neon unreality of Riverdale.

  
Anything to protect him from having to speak to his father about his feelings. About his life. About what had happened to Jellybean on Jughead's watch.

  
“Jug?”

  
Betty was there at his shoulder, the two of them alone together in the cramped back bedroom of the Keller cabin. Jughead wished he could cling to her like she was the last lifeboat there to bear him off the Titanic of his sinking heart, but he knew that wasn't fair to her. In a few short days she had lost an arm and gained an evil brother. Jones family drama was nothing in comparison.

  
So he turned slowly and forced a smile. “Hey. Sorry I shifted into broody Batman mode there. I swear it’s my only vice.”

  
“Keep telling yourself that.”

  
Betty smiled up at him, her eyes so green and bright and loving, he almost wasn't surprised when she took his face in her hand and kissed him very softly.

  
Being almost not surprised still left room for his heart to be set alight and all his blood to run hot and cold. Jughead’s knees were weak for just a moment, but the effort required to steady himself, to gather his thoughts back into his brain after having them blasted out the back of his head by the feeling of her, was monumental. He felt like a bubble the second before it bursts: ecstatically about to be annihilated.

  
“I'm here, Jug. And so are Jellybean and Veronica and Kevin. We're here for you just and you're here for us. Ronnie or I can take point with talking to your dad. You just have to tell us,” Betty said, letting her hand rest on his face. Jughead hoped she couldn't feel the throb of blood rushing to his face, all the life inside of him gathering where it could be close to her.

  
“Betty, I-" he paused, wondering what could possibly tell her everything he needed to say. He wished for some magic phrase to cut through all his fear and uncertainty. To say “I love you”, and have her say “I know”. But instead he said “Thank you.” And for good measure, he hugged her, careful not to squeeze too tight or to touch her bandaged shoulder, but just enough, just close enough that he could imagine a future built in the lack of space between them. Betty's arm wound over his shoulders, and pressed his face to hers, cheek to cheek. His breathing slowed, syncing with hers. It was better than the kiss, a systemic intimacy, not just a tactile one.

  
When they broke apart, the moment pulling shut like curtains across an amber bright window, Jughead said “Thank you, Betty. You, you mean- I mean, you know, thanks. You're a real lifesaver, kid.” As he said that last sentence, he put on his 1940s PI voice, hoping Betty would laugh and not see any further through him than she already had.

  
She did laugh, but Jughead suspected she already knew everything about his heart that she needed to know anyway. Which made it all the more embarrassing that neither of them could or would speak the words and finally make it real.

  
“Are you ready to talk to FP?” Betty asked, hauling him back to the pressing demands of now.

  
“Sure. What's the worst he can reveal?” Jughead rifled through his mental catalogue of impressions and picked a longtime favorite. “‘Jughead, I AM your father!’ Yeah, no kidding, Dad.” He paused for a moment, chewing his lip. “Let me talk to JB first, though. See how she's holding up. And you too, Betty. How are you? After everything?”

  
Betty let out a long hissing sigh, a deflation that spoke of pure misery and exhaustion. “This hasn't been the best week of my life. Though it hasn't been the worst one either."

  
“You've had some Frank McCourt level misery in your life, Betty. And I really wish that wasn't so.”

  
“As if Frank McCourt could compete with having a serial killer for a dad,” Betty said, shrugging. “What I really wish is that we'd got some answers out of the Gargoyle King. We put our lives at risk, like always, and what did we get out of it?” She slumped, and Jughead's heart beat against the bounds of his chest, begging to go out to her. “Nothing. Like always. Nothing.”

  
Jughead took her hand in his, left to left, and held it lightly. He thought they probably looked like they were doing some kind of strange, slow handshake. Which was alright. Because who could see them? Left to left was also flesh to flesh, and the warmth of his fingers against hers, the tiny reciprocal sparks pouring between their fingerprints, that was better than anything anyone else would recognize as love.

  
“We didn't get nothing. We know who the Gargoyle King is. We know about Mr. Lodge, and we know what the Gargoyle King wants us for. We know it’s not what we want. And now we’re going to find out more from my dad.”

  
Betty closed her fingers softly around his, letting the two of them be joined there, at the hand they shared, their anti-wound, the inverse of the limbs that had been taken from them. Jughead thought maybe that was the definition of real love: the anti-wound. The place where you are the opposite of hurt. The place that let you out of Riverdale, even for a moment.

  
“Ready?” Betty said, nodding to the door.

  
“Ready,” Jughead replied, letting their hands drift apart only slowly, wishing he could stretch this conversation out until the end of days.  
Which, as far as he knew, could be tomorrow, if that was what the Gargoyle King wanted.

  
They went out together into the main room of the cabin. Veronica and Kevin were sitting at the small dining table, picking at a tray of tater tots. As Kevin had sadly confessed, only the cabin's freezer was stocked, and then only with dad food. Seeing the mess of ketchup and potatoes confronting his friends, Jughead was struck anew by the undeniable similarities between dad food and kid food.

  
Jughead's own father rested on a small couch which faced an ancient dusty television, not partaking in the half-hearted consumption of tots. FP was completely still, breathing very low and gently, but his eyes were open and he was watching everything, scanning the room right to left, top to bottom, every few seconds. It was uncanny, the way he'd had eyes on Betty and Jughead at the moment they'd entered the room. He'd been listening for them, before they even knew they'd been rejoining the party.

  
“Where's JB?” Jughead asked, noticing a titanium absence.

  
“She went outside for a minute,” said Veronica.

  
“The atmosphere is a little intense for a kid,” Kevin added, gesturing to the door with a potato-laden fork.

  
“Yeah, we're living in an R world, and JB's just barely PG-13,” Jughead said, guilt dancing in circles through his brain. “I'm going to go check on her. Then-" He glanced over to his father. FP's gaze was unflinching, almost sardonic, one eyebrow raised. “Then we talk, Dad.”

  
“Can't wait,” said FP, the sound of his voice filling Jughead’s mind with sludgy, immobilizing memories of alcoholic afternoons. “Hope you've got your thinking beanie on, boy, because Riverdale's a real headscratcher.”

  
Jughead stepped out the front door without responding.

  
The night forest was cold and bathed in moon-white light. Was it unseasonably cold? Jughead realized he didn't know what season it was. Had it just been winter or summer? Was it fall or spring now? Some days the leaves of Fox Forest were a warm, bronzy symphony of Autumn color, but when he looked up now all the trees around were pines, and in the moonlight everything was a thick, milky color. The world was flipped, exposing its pale underbelly.

  
Jellybean stood beneath a particularly tall tree, and she too was a washed out white, cut with chiaroscuro stretches of black shadow. Her eyes glowed a delicate gold, whirring as they shifted to take him in.

  
“How’re you doing, JB?” he asked, speaking quietly, knowing her highly calibrated mics would find him. Not long ago he'd tried to plan a surprise birthday party for her with Toni, Fangs, and Sweet Pea, only to discover that Jellybean had heard it all, clean across the Serpents' camp. She made fun of him for hating his own birthday while plotting hers, and he’d reminded her that she’d been begging for a party for years. Jellybean was surprised he remembered. She had stopped asking after Sweetwater.

  
“Dad says I'm not real,” said Jellybean, eyes pivoting away to stare out over the horizon. “He says the real Jellybean died at Sweetwater and I'm just a jumped-up combat bot with an inflated sense of my own humanity.”

  
Jughead went to stand beside her, following her gaze out into the dark sky. It was still night somehow, even after all that time they’d been underground. Jughead wished he could recall the season and how long the nights were supposed to last. It must be fall, every new night seemed to stretch longer than the last. But it was so hard to tell.

  
What had Colonel Andrews used to say? “Riverdale’s always cold enough for a varsity jacket, and always warm enough for a shirtless run.”

  
Jughead laughed, and then remembered the conversation he was actually in. “I think we've all got an inflated sense of our own humanity,” he said, aiming for a wry tone and not sure he’d nailed it.

  
“Thanks, Kid Sartre,” Jellybean replied. He could hear the hiss of laughter in her speakers. That was a small comfort.

  
“Look, JB,” Jughead said, forcing himself to look right up into her glowing eyes with as sincere an expression as he'd ever managed. “Until you and I remember what happened to our bodies at Sweetwater or somebody can tell us, we're going to have to go on what we feel. And I feel absolutely certain that you're my sister. The D.W. to my Arthur.”

  
“The Katara to your Sokka,” said Jellybean, really laughing now.

  
“The Megan to my Drake and my Josh.”

  
“You're inflating your range now,” Jellybean said, bending her knees to the ground until she and Jughead’s faces were level. Gently Jellybean enclosed him in a hug, her servos whispering with tiny adjustments in pressure, the difference between comfort and crushing.

  
Jughead embraced her chassis, his metal arm thudding against her metal shoulders. For a moment he too held back, remembering her as a little child armed with a slingshot and a smile. But the person he held now wasn’t that child anymore, and so he squeezed with all of his might, hoping against hope that a little of what he felt might make it through Jellybean's impenetrable shell.

  
“I love you, Jug.”

  
“I love you too, JB.”

  
Jellybean slid back to her full height, almost lifting Jughead off the ground before he released her. Her knees bent backwards, shifting her body away from him, the way she always did when she had to deliver unpleasant news. “I'm going to go look for Toni and the Serpents now. I'm not ready to go back in there with Dad.”

  
“Are you sure? They could be anywhere. It’ll be dangerous.”

  
Jellybean's eyes flashed red. “All the more reason they need a giant deadly robot on their side. I’m basically indestructible.” She tapped the little blood seal on her chest, careful not to erase any of the alchemical markings. They were the only thing holding her soul in her robot body. “If I don’t find Toni and the others, I'll come back.”

  
“I know there's no point in trying to dissuade you when you've made your mind up. Remember when you wanted to adopt that injured possum?”

  
“The one that started living in the walls? You know, that’s still the only pet I've ever had,” Jellybean said, sighing with a static-y fizz.

  
“What about Hot Dog?”

  
“He’s yours. But if I find the Serpents, I’ll see how that smelly old mop is doing.” Jellybean took a few steps into the trees, and then looked back. All Jughead could see of her were two eyes glowing nightvision green. “Catch ya later, Jug.”

  
“After a while, crocodile,” Jughead replied, thinking of all the dads and big brothers he knew from movies, what they would say right now.

  
Jellybean's eyes scrolled up and down, the gesture she'd invented to replace rolling the eyeballs she no longer had. “You're a real cheeseball, Forsythe Pendleton.”

  
“And you're a real cynic, Forsythia.”

  
Jellybean disappeared into the shadows beneath the trees as if she'd never existed, her eyes becoming low, diffuse glows like fireflies in the deep night haze, until they disappeared.

  
Jughead did not wait there or try to watch her go. He went directly back to the cabin, and, in a moment of clarity for which he’d later congratulate himself, opened the front door with his left hand. He'd torn a door off its hinges with his right hand once. That hadn’t been a very well-secured door, but he wasn't sure how well-maintained the Keller hunting cabin was either.

  
His friends were watching the entrance, and each of them tried and failed to conceal their worried expression as he stepped inside.

  
“Where's JB?” asked Betty.

  
“She left. Apparently someone,” and here Jughead sent his dad a roiling glare, “told her she ‘wasn't real' and ‘isn't a person'.”

  
FP Jones let his son's hateful look wash over him like it was a breath of fresh air. “I told that bot the truth. I had a daughter, and she died, and that’s it. Then the Lodges fed you some insane story that you were too wacked out to argue with. Now you drag a Lodge-made machine with you everywhere, and you don’t think for a second that that’s why your rebellion’s not getting anywhere,” FP said, his expression blank and bored and thus so very effective in showing his exact opinion of Jughead's decisions.

  
Jughead clenched his right fist until the joints buckled and the screws squealed. Squeezing his hand shut like that was technically painless, but the sound and strain had become so familiar as to be like pain to Jug. He recognized the twin sensations with the same thrill and horror that accompanied every moment of real flesh ache.

  
“How do you know any of that is true, Dad? You weren't here.”

  
FP pushed himself to his feet, and came around the couch to stand toe to toe with Jughead, though he still rested one arm on the seatback for stability. As FP confronted Jughead, the horrible ravages of time and imprisonment on FP’s body confronted him too, displaying just how profoundly the older man’s body had been twisted almost beyond recognition. FP was so much thinner than Jughead had ever seen him, and paler too, his stubble thick and bristly and speckled with grey. Jughead noticed a number of new scars on his father's arms, legs, and face, and for a moment he regretted his anger. His father was scored and slashed to the edge of life, and his eyes glowed with a burning, mad fervor Jughead had thought was reserved only for a tall bottle of Stareoff Ice Vodka or a case of Coarse Lite Beer.

  
“I was gone, yeah. I did what I had to for you and JB, Jughead. If I'd stayed, the King would have had all four of us in that cell for years. Instead you’ve been out here fighting, even if you make much of it, or even realize what you were up against.”

  
“And what exactly are we up against, Mr. Jones?” said Betty, inserting her voice into the conversation and her presence into the small space separating Jughead and FP. “Answers have been thin on the ground, and as I’m sure you know, even meeting the Gargoyle King doesn’t clear up a lot up.”

  
“If anything, it’s turned up a whole raft of new questions,” said Kevin. “Like where does He get such nice suits?”

  
“Especially cut to fit a writhing nightmare body,” added Veronica.

  
FP smirked in such a bitter way that Jughead almost hit him. He was laughing at them for wondering, for investigating, not at the Gargoyle King for His odd vanity.

  
“You kids really want to know the truth? The truth about everything? Riverdale, the Gargoyle King, your lives?”

  
“YES!” This was a unanimous cry from all four of the teens, and in speaking that demand as one they tied a bond and a promise between them that couldn’t be broken until all their questions were answered. They would know now, or they would never stop looking for answers.

  
“Fine,” FP said, pulling up a chair from the dining table and lowering himself into it, his whole body quaking from the effort. “But answer a question of mine first: what year is it?”

  
“20…” and Jughead stopped short. It was like the season, the time of year, the time of day. When he wasn’t thinking about it, he was sure he knew, sure it was obvious, but when he tried to capture it, speak it, the knowledge spilled out from between his fingertips like ice cold water or burning hot sand.

  
“Nick St. Clair asked me almost the same question,” said Veronica, more to herself than to FP. “He wanted to know when the last time was I’d seen a calendar.”

  
“I thought it was still 19… Actually I don’t know,” said Kevin, eyes widening. “I thought my dad had a calendar in his office, but whenever I try to picture it, it’s not there.”

  
“Wait!” Betty said, holding up her jacket’s weighty corner pocket. “Ronnie, can you help me get this out?” Veronica unzipped the jacket’s pocket and handed Betty the small pink wallet within. The wallet had a clear plastic face with Betty’s North Side Academy School ID inside. Betty scanned the little card closely. “There’s no date on here. No year. No ‘Class of Whatever’. I thought for sure there was something.”

  
“You’re all wrong anyway. It’s not 2018 or 1958 or any year in between,” FP said quietly, looking down at his bare, dirt-caked feet. They bore thick calluses and hundreds of bright white scars, marks that told of years of wandering and struggle. “It’s 2098.”

  
“What.” Jughead wasn’t even sure he’d said it, wasn’t sure he could speak. It didn’t make sense. Of all the years he’d flipped through in his head, trying to snap shut around the right one, 2098 hadn’t been one of them. If it was 2098 now, then what year was he born? 2082? It sounded like a year out of a sci-fi show, and not a particularly good one either.

  
“How is that possible?” Betty asked. “If what you’re saying is true, then why have there been no advances in technology since, like, 2018? Why do we still drive cars out of the Fifties instead of cars that fly?”

  
“Because Riverdale is a dollhouse, Betty, and we’re all the Gargoyle King’s dolls,” said FP, his voice filled with unspent venom and vitriol, a long-held store of hatred welling up inside him. “And we still have it better than most people outside Riverdale.”

  
“What do you mean? What’s outside of Riverdale?” asked Veronica, her voice quavering for the first time in Jughead’s memory, like her heart would break no matter what answer FP gave.

  
“Nothing. Hell. The world ended, and now the vermin of that trash heap all find their way to Riverdale.”

  
“Hey, Mr. Jones, not to put too much demand on an ill and weak man,” interrupted Kevin. “But can you give us a straight answer just once? What happened? Why is Riverdale like this?”

  
“Fine. Though I’m not much of a history teacher.” FP took a deep breath, his lungs rattling ominously. Jughead wondered if there was any piece of his father that wasn’t broken beyond repair, and how much of that damage was from before his imprisonment. Then FP went on, and Jughead forgot everything else.

  
“At the turn of the century, the world was dying. Humanity was killing the Earth, and nobody would or could stop it. So the Earth killed us instead. Floodwaters and temperatures rose, storms raged, the world burned. A small number of people survived, crawling along on the surface of a hostile planet. I’m one of them. So are the rest of your parents, and the people who come from outside the city limits, the people who work at SoDale. All of them.” FP finished this proclamation with a dry, heaving cough. He wheezed and strained, red-faced, until it was hard to be sure if the tears streaming down his face were from the effort of breathing or the effort of admitting the truth.

  
“You really expect us to believe that, Dad? That the whole world descended into Mad Max insanity, and we’re the last haven of civilization left?” Jughead tried to say this defiantly, bravely, but he was so confused and terrified that he was afraid he would vomit, and one look at each of his friends’ faces told him they were feeling the same way.

  
“No, boy, that would be stupid,” FP replied. “Riverdale is no safe haven. Riverdale is a honey trap. Me, your mother, Alice, the Lodges, all of us traveled together in the wasteland, dragging ourselves along, not caring what happened to us next, until one day we got into a real squeeze. That was when He showed up. The Gargoyle King offered us a town, a home, just like before the Crash. Maybe even better. All we had to do was promise Him our children.”

  
Jughead went to the kitchen sink and retched, staring into the perfect black circle of the drain, willing himself to hold it in, to maintain to his body as a sane place even as his mind overflowed with horror and misery. All the explanations he’d imagined, all the stories he’d drawn up to make it all make sense, none of them were like this. None of them were anything like this, because this didn’t make any sense at all. And it hurt so much.

  
“For what? What do you mean, ‘promise Him your children’? Promise Him us?” asked Betty, her voice strong but high, pressed to the breaking point.  
“You have to understand.” Now FP’s tough guy act was crumbling and he was pleading with them openly. “It was before any of you were born, even thought of. It was so bad out there, out in that dead world, living like insects on a corpse. We thought it would be worth it. We didn’t know what He wanted from all of you. We didn’t know He wanted you to suffer.”

  
“You knew he wanted us for something!” Veronica screamed. “All this means is you and my parents and Betty’s parents and all of you, all of you ‘grown-ups’ raised us up like cattle for slaughter, and you never even asked why!”

  
“We were born to be food,” said Kevin. “Food for a magic demon from who-knows-where. So our parents could escape the post-apocalyptic hellscape of a world they’d destroyed.”

  
“Yes.” FP was all shame now, but it still didn’t feel like enough. Jughead wanted to go to his father and scream at him, throw him out of the cabin, refuse to believe a word he’d said. But he couldn’t, because of the look on FP’s face. Jughead could think of only a few times previously when his father had looked at him like that. They were sad, sober mornings, after FP had plowed through a couple of six packs, maybe a case, and raged and spat all through the night. But when FP woke up, he’d find himself in bed and clean, propped up on pillows with his boots off, and his little son at the end of the bed, eyes wide and waiting for his father to come back to him.

  
That was the only other time Jughead had ever seen his father look so truly sorry and so he knew this story was true. Unbelievably, agonizingly true.

  
Jughead closed his eyes and counted to ten, begging his brain to stabilize and let his body stabilize with it. He left the sink and returned to face FP. On his left, Veronica’s face shone with tears as she gulped for air, her eyes red and swollen, bleeding black mascara down her cheeks. Kevin paced behind Jughead, running his hands through his hair, first left, then right. Left, right, left, right, until he started to look wild and mad, like his own evil twin, hair thatch-like and face puffy. To Jughead’s right, there was Betty. She was quiet, her one arm tight across her abdomen, as if she’d been stabbed and now she had to clutch her own guts back into her body.

  
Jughead met his father’s gaze, and FP suddenly looked so old and so sad that Jughead could no longer bear hate him. It had all been an awful mistake, he thought, and then wondered what he meant by it. He, Jughead, had been a mistake? Riverdale? His own father? They all were, it seemed.

  
“We need you to tell us everything, Dad. From the beginning,” Jughead said, voice thick. It was agonizing to speak, but Jughead had said many times before that he would walk through fire for answers, and now here were the answers, waiting on the other side of the inferno.  
“Alright,” said FP. “But you can’t understand, you can’t imagine what it was like out there.”

  
“Just tell us,” said Veronica. “And we’ll let you know exactly what we think when you’re done.”

  
So FP told the story.

  
“There was a Great Crash. I don’t remember the year anymore. I was just a teenager, and all at once all the rules changed. The waves were too high, the sun too bright, the winds too powerful. Nothing we built would stand. The world was tearing open, and no one knew what to do. So I walked. I walked along the highway, and I did what I had to do to live. Lots of things that I’m not proud of. But I have so few things in my life to be proud of.” FP looked up at Jughead, eyes wide, begging not to have to go on. Jughead shook his head, and FP continued.

  
“I found others in time. Alice, Hiram, Hermione, Gladys, Penelope, Tom, Sierra, all the people you know as the adults of Riverdale. We weren’t like you see us now. We took what we wanted and we killed if we had to. Nothing less than that.”

  
“My dad wouldn’t have-,” Kevin tried to interrupt, but FP waved him into silence with one thin arm.

  
“The Tom you know as your father is nothing like the man I walked the highways with. He might have always had that good heart in him, but nobody had a chance to make much use of it out there. We pretended not to be afraid of anything then. We called ourselves the Careless Wanderers, but deep down we were scared of everything, especially each other. Someday you’ll see the worst in each other, and you’ll feel the same.”

  
Jughead couldn’t help it. He glanced over at Betty, and found her eyes waiting for his. What would be the worst of Betty? Nothing like what FP meant. Jughead thought of the anti-wound, the bridge between them that could make him forget everything in Riverdale except her. He told himself there would never be reason for them to fear each other. They were not like Alice and FP, and never would be.

  
“I’ve already seen the worst in my parents,” said Veronica. “You’re like E! News, you’re not telling me anything new or true. Get on with it.”

  
“We came to a place on the coast, a good place, shielded from the weather, fish in the river, forests full of life. We wanted to stay, but it already belonged to other people. There were more of them than us, and we almost moved on. But that night He came. The Gargoyle King offered to sweep the way clean, and not only that, reinvent the world for us. All we had to do was make the deal.”

  
“What-what happened to the people?” asked Kevin. “The people who lived here before us?”

  
“In the morning, they were gone. Completely gone. Not a sign of them anywhere. And in their place was Riverdale. We hadn’t such a clean, safe place since we were kids. I think I spent that whole first day in the bath.” FP still smiled at this memory, all this time later, and Jughead wondered how long it had been since his father had felt really clean, whether you could really be so dirty you’d sell your unknown son’s life for a hot bath.

  
“And then you started paying up your end of the deal?” Jughead said.

  
“The Gargoyle King would let us know when it was time, who our partner would be, how we would treat the child that came after. He had instructions for everything. And all the while people kept wandering in, like Riverdale was a beacon to the whole wasteland. Sometimes they would stay, like Hal Cooper. Become part of the town. But most of the time they disappeared after a while, into the SoDale Complex. Or just off the face of the Earth. You knew not to ask, because it wasn’t you.

  
“Not long after you were born, Jughead, He introduced alchemy. I didn’t understand why for a long time. Why He’d want us to have that kind of power. Then I saw what He was making.”

  
“Philosopher’s stones,” said Betty. “We saw His minions working on them in South Side Academy.”

  
“Pure life. Pure suffering. His favorite things in all the world,” FP murmured, staring off into the middle distance. “He used to tell me He was going to use you and Jellybean to make one, Jug. That He would make me watch.”

  
But instead it was Jughead watching now, watching his father begin to cry like a man scraped empty of everything except regret, real tears drawing clean lines in the grime on his face. Jughead felt a phantom pain growing in his right elbow, the ghost of his missing arm warning him that his insides were tearing themselves apart from sorrow right now, as if he weren’t already aware.

  
“After you kids were born, that was when time got strange. We would wake up each morning and find our clocks and calendars disappeared or dissolved into gibberish. The seasons got even wilder than they were during the Crash. The years turned inside out until we couldn’t count on anything. There’s no natural law here. Everything happens only when He demands.”

  
“Then how do you know what year it is?” said Kevin.

  
FP rolled up his tattered left sleeve. Little black flecks curled over his inner arm, twenty-five or thirty, like bits of ash slipped under his skin. “I’ve been counting since Jughead was born.”

  
“But that’s not right then,” said Betty. “Jughead’s only sixteen, and you’ve got twenty-six marks there.”

  
“Do you really not know?” FP said, rolling down his sleeve and shaking his head. “Have you seen yourselves? Have you seen actual teenagers? The Gargoyle King has been sending us all around the same bends over and over again as long as it amuses him. You’ve all been in high school for ten years.”

  
“You know, it’s amazing the way you’ve been able to confirm each and every one of my worst nightmares as reality, Mr. Jones,” said Kevin. His face was flat and white and lifeless, but but his body twisted with nervous energy. He bounced on the balls of his feet, back and forth with every word.

  
“It’s the truth.”

  
“So, just to recap,” said Veronica, voice cutting into the conversation, sharp as a shard of glass. “Riverdale was founded by the Gargoyle King in order to raise a generation of young people whose suffering he could feed on, while protecting our parents from the howling apocalypse outside, and none of us knew our real ages or even what year it was this whole time.”

  
“Yes.”

  
“I don’t often turn to the vulgar for my expression, but all I can think to say is, ain’t that some shit.” Veronica’s face soured as she spoke, the words fitting poorly in her carefully painted mouth.

  
“So where’s the evidence?” said Betty. “Besides the fact that strange things happen in Riverdale all the time, which could mean anything.”

  
“I don’t have any evidence,” FP replied sharply. “I don’t need any evidence. I was there. I saw all of it happen.”

  
“But we need evidence, Dad. We weren’t there,” said Jughead. “This wouldn’t be the first time you’d ever lied to me. Though it would be by far your most elaborate.”

  
“And why wouldn’t any of our parents tell us?” said Kevin, drawing himself up in defense of his father. "If my dad really was one of your ‘Careless Wanderers’ for years and years, why would he lie to me for so long? Make up stories about his army days and everything?”

  
“You think the Gargoyle King hesitates to punish people for speaking out? Do the Lodges? But you don’t have to believe me. You want proof?” FP glared at a space a few feet behind and above Jughead’s left shoulder. “Leave the city limits. Cross the river to Greendale and see what He and the Lodges really had you all fighting at Sweetwater.”

  
“Okay. We will,” Betty said. “Kevin? Veronica? Jug? Are you with me?”

  
“All the way,” said Jughead.

  
“Until we see this through,” said Veronica.

  
“Do you even have to ask?” said Kevin.

  
“Then we’ll go after we’ve had some rest. You should sleep too, Mr. Jones.”

  
FP shook his head. “I’m not coming over the city limits. My body can’t take it.”

  
“Do I even want to know what that means?” asked Kevin.

  
“You’ll find out soon enough.” And with that, FP pushed off from his chair and shuffled into the kitchen, leaning against the counter as he reeled his way to the fridge, presumably searching for beer.

  
Jughead looked from Betty to Veronica to Kevin. They all bore the marks of the revelation FP had bequeathed upon them, namely utter emotional exhaustion and all-consuming sadness. But he saw something else there as well, a stony determination visible in the brightness of their eyes. They had been born just to die, meat for a machine the size and shape of which they’d only just begun to realize. Seeing it now, even in all its size and menace, meant they could see its weaknesses too. They would go to Greendale, and they would discover if FP’s story was true. Then they would dismantle the machine from the inside, even if it consumed them in the process.

  
Out the window something sparkled brightly for just a second, catching Jughead's eye. It was still shadowy out there, still night somehow, but the first thin bright fingers of dawn were stretching out through the forest, the light catching on all the dew-soaked needles of the pines. The little rays of light refracted through the minuscule droplets of water, and together they began to light the world, pointing the way towards daylight.

  
Jughead told himself that that was the only truth that really mattered, the only thing he needed to be sure of.

  
That all nights come to an end, eventually.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time, a short Archie interlude: 8/7/2019
> 
> And then Toni returns to lead a prison break and finally, finally, finally we get some Cheryl: 9/6/2019


	9. Archie Considers Running His Own Life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Archie faces his greatest challenge yet as he is forced to do some deep thinking about what he wants and why. Our favorite/least favorite doofus finds himself at a crossroads, but for once he might make the right choice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this chapter is late! It is brought to you by the letter S, for "short-notice cross country move" and "sick cat", otherwise known as the sorts of delays that keep us from investing the time that Riverdale truly deserves.

People were always saying things like “Get out of your head!”, usually to Jughead, but Archie never really understood what they meant until now. Days and days of cranial imprisonment later and Archie would like nothing more than to force his way out of his own skull, even at the cost of his dashing and chiseled features as Veronica so often described them.

Or, used to describe them.

Archie was tremendously, overwhelmingly, indescribably bored. He was still adrift in the strange swirling grey space where he and Other Archie had made their deal, but now Archie was very much alone. His main source of entertainment was singing to himself, starting with the camp songs he learned in Sweetwater Scouts, and working his way up to the songs he and Josie wrote together just before the Sweetwater Engagement. Occasionally, just as he reached the climactic verse, a little window would open in the haze and Archie would instead watch whatever his body was up to in the Other Archie’s hands. 

At first he derived a perverse thrill from riding passenger in his own body, watching the Other Archie, “Greed”, run his life. Greed mostly did what Archie would have done, though, so he wasn’t sure what the point of being possessed was. The two of them, in their one body, waited on Mr. and Fuhrer Lodge, and Archie was rather hurt that Mr. Lodge never asked about him or addressed him as Archie anymore. Greed and the Lodges went on and on about “Our Father” this and “Ascension Day” that. It was so confusing that Archie struggled to follow the conversation, especially because when they were all three together, the Lodges weren’t Fuhrer Lodge and Mr. Lodge anymore, but Wrath and Pride. Archie counted off the Seven Deadly Sins on his hand, but only came up with five. In a way he was glad, though, as straining to remember the missing sins gave him something to think about for days at a time.

Greed-as-Archie (Grarchie? Archie considered and discarded the name over the course of a day or two) also helped the Red Circle, which largely consisted of lurking in the shadows until a South Side Serpent or a labor organizer came running past. Then they struck, bloodily, with blazing sharp claws. Archie discovered that firing a gun at someone with the possibility of killing them was not anything like tearing them apart with true intent to kill.

The visceral unpleasantness of Greed’s preferred method of murder was doubled because Greed’s control of their limbs started off a little shaky. Archie would not have drafted the two of them onto the varsity football team in that condition, but by day four or five they moved with the unstoppable force and skill of a top-level quarterback. Better than Archie ever moved on his own, he was embarrassed to admit. And the trick with turning his skin coal-black and diamond-hard was pretty darn cool. To feel bullets bounce off your chest like popcorn really did make you feel like Superman (though Archie was then always forced to remember the last time he’d been pelted with popcorn, at the North Side Academy Battle of the Bands, the event which marked the end of his public music career).

Every time Archie remembered something sad or embarrassing like that, Greed showed up at his shoulder (if indeed it was his shoulder. Archie was uncertain what form exactly he now took, given that he was a ghost inside the machine of his own body). Greed would float before him in the empty, cloudy space of Archie’s mind, and try to engage him in conversation about his greatest moments of misery.

“What was that like, Arch? To lose that Battle of the Bands so badly everyone in Riverdale laughed you off stage?” Greed asked, sprawled on a fluffy bank of errant thoughts. Archie tried not to look directly at his companion. He still found it a bit disconcerting, talking to himself when it so clearly wasn’t him. Greed continued to appear in the form of a second, monochrome Archie. It was irritating, and a little disconcerting.

“It sucked, obviously.”

“You must have wanted to win very badly. That title would have been a real feather in your cap, a way to jumpstart your music career.”

“I don’t know, man,” said Archie, trying to remember how he’d felt back then. It was such a long time ago. “A music career would take me away from Riverdale, from Veronica, Betty, Jughead, everybody and everything I care about.”

“I’m confused, though,” said Greed, stretching out to put his feet up on a little free-floating nubbin of cloud which Archie was able to identify as congealed worry about his freshman year grades. “When was the last time you even spoke to Betty or Jughead?”

Archie’s forehead crinkled as he chewed on the question. “I guess it was a while ago. Betty and I had a big fight, and Jughead switched schools. But I miss them.”

“So you might say you want them in your life again? And Veronica too?”

“Yeah, of course. In case you can’t tell, I’m pretty tired of talking to you,” Archie said, folding his arms over his chest, wishing he could feel his actual arms folding over his actual chest. He thought sometimes he could move, but these were almost always dreams. It didn’t make sense that he still needed to sleep, being a figment of his own imagination now, but he did drift off sometimes, when Greed put their body to bed.

In his dreams, Archie was always standing beside the Sweetwater Swimming Hole, with the rope in one hand, about to swing out over the water.

Beneath him, floating on their backs, were his three friends. They shouted encouragement up at him, joked that he was afraid to get wet, made a big deal of how comfortable they were and how cool the water was. Every time Archie leapt, excited to be there with them, and as soon as he reached the high point of his arc, the rope disappeared. It shouldn’t be scary without the rope, since he was planning to let go anyway, but when his hands clenched shut on empty space and he began to fall into the dark water, Archie was overwhelmed with terror. It was then that he swore he was moving his real body, his arms flying up to shield his face from the impact.

But it was just a dream.

“I can help you, Archie. I can help you get your friends back. All we have to do is catch the right Serpent and squeeze the truth out of them,” Greed said, miming the squeeze until his knuckles cracked.

“And then what?” Archie thought of Veronica again, burning down a whole building without any thought for who or what might be in there. “I think Veronica’s more likely to torch me than hug me.”

And Jughead. When he had last talked to Jughead? Mostly Archie just saw him walking through Riverdale with his big black Serpents jacket, advertising his edginess and his anger like a billboard selling torment and tousled hair. When he had last said anything to Jughead at all?

Archie remembered, all at once, and felt a little sick. Months before, the Serpents had attacked a supply convoy on the outskirts of town. Archie and the rest of the Red Circle were hidden in the trucks, masked and armed, knowing exactly what would happen to an undefended trio of trucks. As soon as they passed beneath the thick tree canopy of Fox Forest, the earth beneath the truck began to groan and the truck itself tilted wildly. Archie, the other officers, and all the supplies tumbled together in a messy salad of limbs and weapons and little packets that came spilling out of the broken boxes.

When he came to, Archie thought he would pass out again immediately. As it was a stealth mission, Archie wore a standard issue identity-obscuring black balaclava. Now it pressed on his face with a smothering weight. His throat burned with a dry, scraping heat. White and pink dust floated around him, borne up into the air out of torn paper packets labelled “G” by the flipping of the truck. Archie crawled out of the truck, panting, desperate for an unfettered and untainted breath. 

All three trucks lay on their sides, upended by a huge earthen hand, which bore the telltale scaly markings of alchemical transformation along its length. Archie’s truck had been at the rear of the convoy, and it was by far the least damaged. The other two trucks were crumpled all over, their doors hanging loose and open and their ceilings dented like moonscapes. Five or six people swarmed around the middle truck, and all of them wore black jackets bearing the green curve of the South Side Serpents. Perched on the side of the upended middle truck was a person whom Archie found worryingly familiar. They gestured to the wreckage and the moonlight glinted on a bright metal hand. 

It was Jughead.

“If they have G in them, torch them! We’re not going to let the Lodges peddle any more drugs in our town!” he said, and the Serpents spread out, bearing gasoline cans and matchbooks.

Archie knew he should run, that he was out-numbered and out-gunned, and that if he stayed quietly, he would only live to see the Serpents incinerate the trucks and all the Red Circle officers in them. He couldn’t look away, though. Because there was his former best friend, leading a dangerous gang that did nothing but destabilize and destroy.

“Jughead!” Archie cried out, his voice hoarse.

Jughead looked up and over, and froze. “Red Circle on the move! Serpents on guard!” The other Serpents shifted directions, all moving back into the protective sphere of Jughead’s alchemical range.

Archie took a step forward, then stopped, realizing that Jughead had no idea who he was under his balaclava. If he took it off and Jughead saw him, maybe then Jughead would back off, give it up. Or maybe Jughead would let his Serpents tear Archie apart. He’d heard many times from the Lodges about what the Serpents did to their enemies.

Archie couldn’t move, couldn’t replace the fuse in his brain fast enough, and so he stood unmoving as the rest of the Red Circle officers, newly conscious, burst from the back of the rear truck and opened fire on the Serpents. Jughead leapt from his perch and took off, waving for his Serpents to follow. One Serpent took a hit to the shoulder and went tumbling down. Jughead turned to help them, and Archie finally reached up and tore off his mask, letting sweet, fresh air wash over his face finally. He waited to meet Jughead’s eyes, to confront him.

Jughead didn’t seem to notice Archie’s unveiling. He lifted the injured Serpent and the two of them hobbled into the shadowy forest, leaving Archie behind in the wreckage.

“That’s the guy that used to be your best friend?” asked Greed, now pacing in tight circles in front of Archie. “Far be it from me to tell people not to want something, but he didn’t even recognize you. And you’re mortal enemies.”

“We’re not mortal enemies. We’re just…” Archie couldn’t finish, because he wasn’t sure how. Loneliness swirled around his ankles, a rising tide that threatened to drown him. “We’re just going through some stuff.”

“Sure.” Greed stretched and yawned. “Maybe I’m not the one to tell you this, but you have some kind of complex, kid. You think Betty and Jughead are your two best friends and Veronica is your endgame girl, but they’re on the wrong side of a war that you and I are fighting on the frontlines. What’s more important to you: your ex-friends who are definitely trying to kill you, or saving Riverdale like the Fuhrer and the First Husband want?”

With that, Greed dissolved into the cloud bank, and distantly Archie felt his body sputter back to life, marching off to the North Side Probationary Academy for some Lodge-appointed purpose. Alone now, Archie picked at Greed’s parting words. 

That was the problem, wasn’t it? The reason he’d been fighting with Betty, Veronica, and Jughead so much was of course that they were on opposite sides. He realized his friends had been telling him that over and over, in as many ways as they could, for months. Veronica breaking up with him and burning down the Five Seasons. Jughead leading a rebellion against Archie’s bosses. Betty refusing to see him after he asked her not to investigate the Lodges.

Archie felt incredibly stupid. This wasn’t a misunderstanding or argument that his friends would come around on eventually. This was a war, a conflict that hinged on philosophies and convictions Archie didn’t quite understand. Jughead, Betty, and Veronica were always so angry about things the Lodges were supposed to have done or not done, and Archie just didn’t have it in him. Riverdale was meant to be a safe, happy, beautiful place, and for him it always was, until his dad died. 

But maybe it hadn’t been for his friends. Maybe Riverdale didn’t mean to them what it did to him.

This realization pressed the limits of Archie’s understanding, but he clung to it, because gestating beneath it was another thought. The new thought was sharper and weightier than any other one before it. Archie was afraid to touch it, to pick it up and examine it, but the longer he waited the clearer it became, whether he wanted to acknowledge it or not.

_Maybe I was wrong._

It hurt to admit, but he tried to let the acceptance roll through him. The more he thought it, the less it hurt, and the more he was sure he needed to change everything. There must be a compromise he could reach with his friends, a way to make Riverdale a good place for all of them. Maybe it meant convincing the Lodges to change their ways. Maybe it meant dealing with this “Our Father” guy Greed always visited in the tunnels under Riverdale.

Archie wasn’t sure about the long-term details of his plan. He wasn’t sure it could even be called a plan yet. But he knew his first step. He thought of Veronica, Jughead, Betty and how much they needed him, how many times already he’d disappointed them. Regret burning inside him, Archie reached out into his own body and tried to wiggle his pinkie.

Nothing happened. Archie strained, struggling to remember how it felt to move with grace and ease, to move with less than a thought, and still he couldn’t get his body to respond.

He was missing something. Archie stopped, sitting down with his knees folded against his chest, the way he used to imagine posing for his album cover (except when he’d imagined it, he would be sitting in a recording studio or a cool bar and not a miserable, other-dimensional mindscape). The connection between Archie’s mind and body was severed, but there must be a way to rebuild it. All the wires within him were connected, ready and waiting to transport impulses back and forth between brain and body. They just needed a little nudge to get going again.

How had he learned to move his body before, when he was training for football or practicing the guitar?

It was summertime, years and years before. Archie couldn’t count how many. He was on the front lawn with his dad, who held a battered old football, so thoroughly worn the skin was peeling off in many places. His dad smiled down at him (it was so long ago that his dad could smile **down** at him), and lifted his arm high, waiting for Archie to get in position. Archie ran backwards as fast as he could, almost falling but catching himself just in time, and raised his arms above his head. He cried out “I’m open! I’m open!” as if his father didn’t know, as if there were anyone else to toss the ball to. It felt good to ask because his father’s steady, loving answer always reassured.

“Get ready, son!” Mr. Andrews reared back (at the time it had seemed like a heroic effort full of Olympian grandeur, but it was a light toss really) and let the football fly. It arced up and up, and then spiraled downward towards Archie’s waiting hands. He leapt for it, and the soft impact, the slight stinging thud of the ball landing in his hands, was the greatest feeling in the world.

Out in the real world, Archie’s right pinkie twitched.

In his grey-clouded prison, Archie cheered. Then he turned his attention to his ring finger. He would go one at a time, if it came to that. He had nothing else to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time, Toni finally orchestrates her prison break and is reunited with her Bombshell, but what fresh hells (and fresh enemies) accompany this daring escapade?: 9/6/2019
> 
> Thanks as always for reading! The longer you endure, the more wild it will get, I promise!


	10. The Great Escape

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Toni puts her plan to rescue Cheryl into action. But as they say, no plan survives contact with the enemy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter brought to you by the letter N for "New Job", which is why we're down to the wire posting today.

            Toni prided herself on having very sharp eyes. A strong read on a scene was essential to being a good photographer, after all. It was also rather handy on stakeouts.

            Toni, Sweet Pea, Fangs, and Jellybean crouched in a thick bramble, shadowed by hulking green fir trees. They didn’t really need the cover, though. The eyes they were trying to avoid wouldn’t be able to spot them from this distance. But Toni could make out her enemies with near-perfect clarity. The guards of the North Side Probationary Academy paced in pairs in front of every entrance, and another duo walked the fence. They never paused in their patrol, tirelessly marching the perimeter until Toni was exhausted just watching them.

            The Probationary Academy—prison, really—was just as well-guarded as Toni remembered it. Better guarded even. The Lodges clearly anticipated an attack, probably by their newly pyromaniacal daughter and her friends.

            But perhaps not by some secondary South Side Serpents.

            “Tones?” Fangs whispered, so low they all leaned close to hear him. “Did we have a plan, or is it just a charge into the hail of bullets? Because, you know, I’m happy my seat in Valhalla is assured, but I’d actually rather not die any time soon.”

            “Yeah, seconded,” Sweet Pea said. “I know you’ve been planning this for a while, but is now really the best time?”

            “Yes.” Toni let the word hang heavy with confidence and certainty she didn’t feel. “It has to happen now, while Jughead is gone. He won’t back my play on this, but we have to get our people out of there. It’s a victory we really, really need.”

            “You don’t have to tell me,” said Jellybean. “Based on the looks on everybody’s faces after we escaped the Gargoyle King, I think they’re one more setback away from dissolving.”

            “So are the Serpents. And not just when it comes to morale. We’re down so many members after everyone we lost these last few months.”

            “Okay, okay. I’m convinced. We need this victory like the world needs another Fast & Furious movie,” Sweet Pea said, nodding so vehemently he rocked back and forth.

            “This is the kind of thing they’d do in Fast & Furious, too,” added Fangs. “Only they’d have an unstoppable team of, like, ten incredible operatives, and instead there’s four of us, and we’re hungry, tired teenagers who’ve been living in the woods for the last six months.”

            “Don’t lose your confidence now, Fangs.” Toni squeezed his shoulder with one hand, mimicking a gesture she’d seen FP use on nervous subordinates. “We’re not just teens, we’re Serpents.”  
            “And alchemists. Let’s not forget that,” Jellybean said, pressing her hands together and then to the ground to send a little snake of earth twisting into existence before Fangs.

            He smiled at Jellybean, who flashed her eyes at him in response, green to gold and back again. “So there’s gonna be some alchemy to solve all this, is that what you’re saying?”

            “It’ll get us started,” said Toni. “Here’s the plan…”

            It was actually a very simple plan, and thus perhaps a very stupid one. It relied on the four of them working up the terrifying presence of forty. Toni had prepared several transmutation circles for this mission, but for this part of the plan they needed only one each for her, Fangs, and Sweet Pea. Fangs and Sweet Pea weren’t terribly good at alchemy, but they promised her they could activate a simple earth-moving circle. Once the three of them were in place, it would all be up to Jellybean, and whether her arm cannons could shoot fast and far enough to mimic an all-out assault. And whether she had enough ammo.

            The plan, as it was, could go horribly, horribly wrong. It likely would. But Toni was so tired of ducking and hiding, of lying inert with photography as her only half-hearted weapon. Cheryl was right there in that building, suffering as much or more than any of them on the outside. How could Toni wait and wait and wait the way Jughead wanted to? She could do more, and now she was finally able to.

            The four of them crouched in the bushes, poised, waiting for Toni’s mark.

            “Remember, each of us,” Toni gestured from herself to Fangs and Sweet Pea, “deploys within five seconds of each other. You have to get the count right, or it won’t look believable. And if it doesn’t look believable-.”

            “They’ll realize Jellybean’s out there alone. We get it.” Sweet Pea held out a hand, palm facing down, and gestured for the rest of them to follow suit. “We’re Serpents. If we know one thing, it’s that there’s strength in unity. We’re not going to let you down, JB.”

            “Not a chance in hell. We’ve got your back,” Fangs seconded.

            Toni laid her hand atop those of Sweet Pea’s, Fang’s, and Jellybean’s. All three of them radiated nervous energy, but there were smiles on the boys’ faces and Jellybean’s eyes were bright and directed right at Toni. That felt good. It felt right.

            “On my count, then! We go and we don’t stop until we’ve gotten everyone out. Ready?”

            Three nods. Toni counted them off, pressing down on their gathered hands with each word.

            “Three.

            “Two.

            “One.

            “GO!”

            They broke apart, twisting away from each other and taking off down the hillside, towards the prison and all its guards.

            Sweet Pea deployed first. Halfway down the hillside, he dropped to his knees and pulled out his transmutation circle. Pressing it to the earth with both hands, he squeezed his eyes shut and, Toni hoped, let the power roll through him. She was not disappointed. Around them the ground roiled, pillars of earth shooting up from the ground. Each of them was oddly humanoid in shape, if lumpy and faceless. In the darkness, at a distance, Toni hoped they looked like the silhouettes of people, racing towards the prison fence.

            For the illusion to succeed, they really had to be racing, however. Fangs was next. Reaching the edge of Sweet Pea’s radius of effect, he too dropped and carried out the same transmutation. The army of earthy people advanced with a great thundering and crackling of energy.

            In the floodlights that illuminated the prison yard, Toni watched the guards begin to notice, to leave their posts and approach the part of the fence nearest the Serpents’ little army. Those closest to the approaching horde opened fire, the bullets lodging safely in the dirt soldiers’ unfeeling earthen bodies.

            At the edge of Fang’s radius, Toni dropped and prepared her circle. “Open fire as soon as they’ve clustered, Jellybean!” She called out to the little girl, and wondered if she was doing the right thing, encouraging an eleven year old to kill.

            But that was war. War was ugly, and cruel. War was also the price of freeing Riverdale, of liberating Cheryl and the other prisoners. It would be worth it if she could just hold Cheryl again. It would be worth it if they could all live without fear for the rest of their lives.

            The guards drew closer and closer to the fence, closer and closer to each other, a clump comfortably within Jellybean’s kill radius. Toni watched as Jellybean lifted her arms and charged forward, flanked by dirt soldiers still crackling with alchemical energy. Jellybean’s guns whirred as they slid out of her arm sockets and spun into place. She opened fire. Toni dodged behind a dirt soldier, partly for the cover and partly so she didn’t have to see what would happen next.

            The sound was bad enough. High-pitched pings as bullets from the guards ricocheted off Jellybean’s chassis, and an answering thukthukthuk-thud as Jellybean responded in kind, treating the unarmored guards to a taste of their own medicine. There were also screams, howls, cries of agony, and other assorted involuntary sounds provoked by mortal suffering. Toni closed her eyes, but that didn’t help at all. Instead it sharpened the sounds. With no visual channel, everything Toni heard was twice as loud and twice as clear.

            A shriek of metal twisting and tearing slashed Toni’s eardrums and her eyes flew open, unable to let the horrible sound be her only stimulus. She prayed the sound wasn’t Jellybean being broken or hurt. No one knew how to fix Jellybean. She was functionally invulnerable. But functionally invulnerable was not at all the same as totally invulnerable.

Toni peeked around her earthen protector. Jellybean stood at the fence, unharmed. She held a section of chainlink in either hand. Before her was a wide hole torn down the middle of the fence, broken links scattered across the ground.

            Toni burst from cover and ran to Jellybean, sliding to a stop behind the girl’s leg, eyeing the darkness around them for more soldiers.

            “I think I got them all, Toni,” said Jellybean, gesturing to the scene of carnage waiting on the inside of the fence.

            Toni counted, holding back an ocean of revulsion rising in her gut. Blood ran endlessly over the ground, and she was the one who ordered it be spilled. The dirt was churned to a wild red froth, crimson footprints mirrored by the bloody boot bottoms of the dead men.

            There were eight dead, in total. That was all of them Toni remembered seeing from back in the trees. All of them on this side of the compound, and that meant it was time for Stage Two.

            “You got them all, JB,” said Toni, ducking under Jellybean’s arms and through the hole in the fence. She waved for Sweet Pea and Fangs to follow. “Good work.”

            Toni’s friends followed her into the prison yard, picking their way through the gore-sprayed earth until they reached the wall of Cell Block C. Toni had chosen it as the site of their break-in mainly because it was the cell block closest to the fence, but also because she had a feeling Cheryl would be in there, it being Cell Block C and all. Not that that made any sense, but lots of things happened to Cheryl that didn’t make any sense, especially if they contributed to her aesthetic.

            Toni wished she’d thought to bring clothes for Cheryl, something red and slinky. Months spent wearing nothing but prison greys would be absolute torture for Cheryl. And a hairbrush! Why hadn’t Toni brought a hairbrush? And-

            Toni shook herself, trying to throw off the doubts. Rescuing Cheryl was the first step. Everything after was immaterial. It didn’t matter what Cheryl looked like, because she would be Cheryl, Toni’s Cheryl, and she would be free. She could wear nothing if she really wanted to, as long as she wasn’t suffering anymore.

            “Do you want me to open up the wall, Toni?” asked Jellybean, hands poised over the smooth, grey edifice. “Or should we go farther down?”

            “Or maybe find a door? So it isn’t so obvious where we are?” suggested Sweet Pea.

            “No, we’ve got to move quick,” Fangs shot back. “They’ll know we’re here as soon as they find the bodies and the fence. We’re breaking in and chances are we’re going to have to break back out.”

            “We prepared for this,” Toni said, touching her right pocket, where she held the secret weapon. “We knew it would be a fight both ways. We need every shortcut we can get. Open the wall, Jellybean.”

            With a creaking groan, the cinderblocks of the wall unknit themselves, folding away from Jellybean’s hands. They revealed a shadowy hallway, lit by lights too few and far-between to cast any sort of warmth or brightness. The hallway was lined with row upon row of black steel bars, each set bearing a heavy black padlock. Pressed to the bars were Toni’s erstwhile friends, neighbors, and classmates, thirty or forty of them at least, three or four to every cell. She recognized them all immediately: Chuck Clayton, Ethel Muggs, Midge Klump, Reggie Mantle.

Cheryl Blossom.

            Toni dove into the room and pressed herself to the bars of Cheryl’s cell, reaching between them to take Cheryl’s hands, clutching at her smooth cool skin, terribly pale from months without sun.

            “T.T.!” Cheryl’s voice cut through everything, folding away every other aspect of the world until Toni had tunnel vision and the light at the end of it was Cheryl.

            “Cheryl! Cheryl, are you alright?” said Toni, running her hands along Cheryl’s arms, touching her face and her neck. Cheryl’s hair was dark with grease and matted, and her arms were so much thinner than they used to be.

            “Never better, now that you’re here,” Cheryl replied, smiling as she clung to Toni through the bars. “Although I would be extra never better if you’d get me out of this cell.”

            “I almost forgot,” said Toni, pulling back and reaching into her left pocket for another transmutation circle, one to melt iron and steel. She placed the paper over the padlock and activated it, sending all of her desire, desperation, and loneliness through the circle and into the metal. The padlock flared red and fell to the floor, half liquid, puddling around itself.

            Cheryl shoved the cell door open so hard Toni stumbled back and hit the ground with a thud, something pressing her against the icy concrete floor. Feeling heat gather over her whole body, Toni realized it was Cheryl, clinging to her with both arms wrapped around Toni’s waist and her head against Toni’s chest.

            “I missed you so much, Toni,” Cheryl murmured, so quietly that Toni felt the words with her heart more than she heard them.

            “I missed you too, Cheryl.” Toni ran her hands from the top of Cheryl’s head and down her back, letting them rest on Cheryl’s waist, where her jumpsuit, too large by half, melted over them both in grey folds.

            “Not to be crass, ladies,” said a voice from somewhere distant above, “but how far is this going? Because we might not have time for the whole reunion routine just this minute.”

            Toni sat up, shifting Cheryl into a sitting position beside her, and looked up. Reggie looked down at her, a smug smile on his face. “Hi, Reggie.”

            “I don’t recall asking for your opinion, Reginald,” said Cheryl, crossing her arms tightly against her chest and glaring up at their mutual sort-of-friend.

            “How do you even know Reggie is short for Reginald?” Reggie replied, offering Toni a hand, which she reluctantly took, letting him pull her to her feet. He offered the same hand to Cheryl next.

            “What else would it be short for? Regward? Regibald? Regsythe Regleton Jones the Third?” Toni said as Cheryl stood on her own, rejecting Reggie’s offered hand with an indignant sniff.

            “Ignore his stupid jokes, T.T. His name really is Reginald. I’ve heard them say it at roll call every day since he showed up here.” Cheryl turned away, eyes burning across Jellybean, Sweet Pea, Fangs, and her fellow prisoners as if scanning for someone who’d shown up late so she could take them to task.

            “How long have you been here, Reggie?” asked Toni. “Last time I saw you, you were, what, looting the candy store on Maple Street during the Fright Night Riots?”

            Reggie shrugged. “That was a while ago. I’ve been doing a lot of legwork for Veronica since then, until I got picked up about a week or two ago. You know there’s a whole system of tunnels under Riverdale, all ending in a giant underground throne room? With some kind of spooky demon king sitting in the center?”

            “I didn’t until yesterday, but Jellybean tells me she and the usual suspects were just down there, chatting up this demon king.” Toni gestured to Jellybean. “She could give you all the details. But from what she told me, this guy, the Gargoyle King, is the real deal.”

            “The real deal of what?”

            “The real deal of monstrous manipulation and evil action in Riverdale,” Jellybean broke in. “He had my dad in a holding cell, he had Mr. Lodge working for him, he had an evil plan and everything.”

            “I guess that’s good to know,” said Reggie. “Though not my favorite discovery by a long shot. That one was finding out that Sheriff Minetta’s afraid of mice.”

            “Who isn’t?” asked Toni. “Have you ever lived in a vermin trap? It’s awful.”

            “You don’t understand. He’s deathly afraid of them. Like, terrified beyond belief, can’t go back into a building where he saw one afraid of them.”

            “T.T., I know you need the scoops from all of us, but can we save this conversation for later?” Cheryl asked, standing half-in, half-out of the building, one foot tapping sharply against the concrete floor. “I’m not going back into a cell, especially not just to hear Reggie’s gossip.”

            “Wait.” Toni pictured the huge prison complex, its three different wings coming together to frame an equilateral triangle. “Are there more prisoners we should rescue? Anyone else in this wing?”

            “Probably,” said Reggie. “But I don’t know where. We’d have to-.”

            The lights went out. Toni wasn’t sure if they made a noise as they did, or if the sudden change was just so shocking that her mind invented one to go along with the fall of darkness, but either way, she heard an electrical pop, and then a juddering crash as the security doors slammed shut and locked.

            “I have a bad feeling about this,” said Fangs.

            “You can say that again,” said Sweet Pea.

            “I have a-.”

            “Everybody out!” Toni shouted, waving futilely towards the hole. It was too dark for anyone to see her, and she felt a confused tremble run through the crowd as they all simultaneously wondered which way to move for out.

            “Let me.” Jellybean’s voice came floating down out of the darkness somewhere behind Toni and to her right. With a soft click, light also came pouring out of that space, bathing everyone in gold tones. All their terrified faces were illuminated, and so was their exit.

            “Let’s go!” said Toni. “Everybody out!”

            This time everyone heard and everyone obeyed, stumbling and shoving their way through the hole and into the yard.

            The yard was also pitch black. All the floodlights that had washed the yard white and bright when Toni and her crew broke in were now out cold. The escapees had only Jellybean’s eyebeams to show them the way. The world was a fundamentally different place, one of unknown menace rather than obvious head-on opposition.

            Toni saw something move at the edge of the light. She thought maybe it was an animal, it was so fast and it moved so strangely, rippling along the perimeter without leaving the darkness. A single clawed hand, charcoal black except for its bone white fingertips, slipped into the circle and yanked the nearest person into the darkness.

            Their scream echoed across the yard, until it came to a sudden wet stop. Chaos fell upon the crowd. They scattered in all directions, fleeing out of Jellybean’s light only to stumble into one another, lashing out in terror, falling to the ground in a flailing mass.

            Toni took a half second to assess the situation. The hole in the fence was straight ahead. Cheryl was beside her. She wasn’t sure where Sweet Pea and Fangs were, but Jellybean was still behind her, providing just enough light to show the way.

            “Forward!” Toni shouted, grabbing Cheryl’s hand and pulling her towards the fence, towards freedom. The two of them ran towards the gap, and Toni forced herself to charge right through the massacred mess of guards before her. Her feet became uncomfortably warm and damp, and Toni decided to pretend that she had run through a puddle of summer rain instead, even as the hot salt smell of blood rose around her and Cheryl.

            As soon as they were through the fence, she and Cheryl took shelter behind a dirt soldier and watched the horror unfold.

            Jellybean stood at the inside edge of the fence, lighting the way out for the few escapees still on their feet. As soon as they were outside the fence, they took off in every direction, disappearing into the darkness with only the sound of their footfalls left to testify to their existence. Toni wondered what they would do and where they would go without her to show the way, but she stayed behind cover, knowing that gathering together again would make them easier targets. Scattered but alive, they could always come back together.

            Besides those lucky few, the rest of the prisoners Toni had worked so hard to rescue, whom she’d used to justify this quest to save Cheryl, those poor people began to be wiped from existence, annihilated like unwanted animals. Their executioner was a monstrous man. He leapt with the speed and uncaring cruelty of lightning, bouncing from body to body in seconds, and all the while slashing with his deadly white claws. His own body was smooth and grey-black as pencil lead, and it shone the same way too. Featureless and bald, the monster stared out at his victims with dead white eyes, matched by his claws and the bright white fangs that curled out from his mouth.

            He slid in and out of the darkness, and every time he disappeared he took someone else with him. In the darkness themselves, Toni and Cheryl clung to each other, wondering if he could appear on this side of the fence just as easily.

            Jellybean tried to snatch the monster every time he came near her, but her heavy hands always closed shut on empty air, and she couldn’t leave her post. The circle of light she cast at the fence still drew a few survivors out of the killing field, allowing them to escape into the night to an uncertain future that was still better than a bloody death.

            Toni stood and stepped out of her cover.

            “T.T.! What are you doing?” Cheryl said, tugging on the corner of Toni’s jacket.

            “I can’t let them all die, Cheryl. I made this happen,” Toni replied. She glanced back to see Cheryl’s beautiful face, framed by waves of red-orange hair, and she loved it for what she imagined would be the last time. “If I distract him, it might give the survivors time to get away. Maybe Jellybean can lead them back to the Serpents safely.”

            “Toni, don’t!” Cheryl’s eyes were wide and about to overflow with tears, the silvery brightness gathering on her lower eyelids and catching the little bits of Jellybean’s light that reached them. “Toni, I just got you back! You can’t leave me!”

            It wasn’t right, that was true: to have only been back in Cheryl’s arms for minutes before doing this. It wasn’t right at all. But everyone’s life rested in Toni’s hands, everyone who lived and died on this mission was her responsibility. That’s what being a leader meant, so she had no choice. The impact was what mattered, not the impact on her alone, but the impact on every other life in Riverdale, the impact on every other person she had the chance to save.

            Toni turned back to Cheryl, knelt, and kissed her. It was the best feeling in the world, the only good news in a universe of bad. Even after months in prison, Cheryl still tasted sweet, her mouth soft and perfect, pressing back on Toni’s with an uncompromising vehemence as if Cheryl could express everything left to be said through the force of her kiss. Toni held Cheryl’s face as they kissed, memorizing the shape and texture, letting her fingertips love every part of Cheryl she could reach.

            And then Toni pulled away. “I love you, Cheryl. But I have to save these people.”

            “I know,” said Cheryl. Then she stood, and shoved Toni to the side. Cheryl faced the hole in the fence, legs apart, standing for all the world as if she were about to begin a cheer routine. “Hey, creep! Why don’t you leave those poor kids alone and come play with the big girls?” Cheryl shouted. She could be exceptionally loud when she wanted, and now was one of those times. Her voice rang out across the prison yard, echoing off the blank walls of the cell blocks, bouncing against Jellybean’s chassis, shaking the earth, it felt like.

            Toni had to smile.

            As if she felt the love and gratitude through her skin, Cheryl looked over at Toni and smiled back. “If you think I’d let you fight a monster on your own, then you are just plain crazy in the coconuts, T.T.”

            Toni went to Cheryl’s side and took her hand. Her fingers laced with Cheryl’s, Toni felt ten thousand times stronger. She and Cheryl watched as a few more escapees fled past Jellybean. There were no more screams, but Toni suspected that that only meant the monster’s plan of attack had changed.

            The back of her neck prickled, and Toni realized how deep she and Cheryl were in the midnight darkness.

            “Hello, ladies.” The voice was so close it was almost a lover’s whisper, except Toni held her lover beside her, and Cheryl sounded nothing like this killer’s rasp.

            Before either of them could react, Toni and Cheryl shot into the air, tossed like limp jointed dolls. They hit the ground with a dull, bruising thud. Toni heard the breath rush out of her chest, and she strained to draw it back in. Fear colored in the edges of her vision with a red glare, shot through with white lines of panic. It was difficult to even sit up, her head spinning so hard it reminded her of a top she had as a child. It used to spin so quickly it appeared nearly formless, which was very like how Toni currently felt.

            Sitting up she didn’t feel much better. The world listed to one side, then the other, and it was only when Toni put out a hand to steady herself that she discovered it wasn’t the world but herself half-falling back and forth. She couldn’t focus her eyes on anything, and trying made her horribly nauseous.

            Toni reached out for Cheryl, feeling for something of her, a hand, an arm, her hair. If she was going to die, then she was going to die with Cheryl beside her. Not that she wanted to die, or wanted Cheryl to die. But if they had to, then there was no way she and Cheryl were going to leave this life alone, the way so many others had.

            Cheryl’s hand closed around Toni’s wrist, startling her. Even though Cheryl’s hand was gentle and warm, every square centimeter of Toni’s skin was expecting the final blow, the cold, hard skin of the monster. She didn’t know why she imagined the monster as being cold, but he must be. Maybe it was because his skin reminded her of pencil lead. Once, so long ago now, Sweet Pea had poked Toni with a pencil during school, leaving a miniscule grey fragment beneath her skin. Toni squeezed the patch of skin, prodded it and stretched it, but the bit of lead wouldn’t leave. It bothered her more than she liked to admit, even just remembering it. The irritation of it was cold in her mind. Her displeasure at the intrusion was a cold feeling, and the monster too was an intrusion of cold cruelty.

            Toni sensed someone standing above them, and prepared herself for the closing moments. Above her, in the dark, two blank white eyes watched her and Cheryl.

            “I don’t know who you are,” said Toni, imagining herself an action hero, Sarah Connor or Aeryn Sun. “But you’re a monster, and you’ll get what’s coming to you, even if you kill me now.”

            Toni was proud of how good that sounded, but inside she couldn’t begin to believe a single word. She didn’t even know where Jughead was, much less if he would ever come back to lead the Serpents, or if the Serpents could win against a guy like this. If she died now, it could all be lost. No one left to lead the fight in all of Riverdale.

            The monster raised one clawed hand over Toni and Cheryl, flexing his bony fingertips to show off their razor points. “I don’t think that’s true, Toni. I think if you die now, then the resistance dies with you. We can go back to the simple, happy life that is Riverdale. That’s all I want, and it’s too bad you can’t see things my way.”

            Toni recognized the voice. It was one she knew well, but she couldn’t place it. It didn’t fit right with the face or the attitude. Sound and body hit each other at cross purposes, the voice one of happy Sundays at Pop’s and silly jokes, the body inhuman and deadly.

            Her thoughts collapsed into a recognizable shape, and the answer presented itself to her even though it seemed unbelievable. “Archie?”

            The monster flinched, his hand snapping shut above her with a screech of sharp claws on impenetrable skin. Sparks flew from his hand as his fingertips dragged against his palm.

            Light flared all around the monster, Toni, and Cheryl beside her. A rush of air passed across Toni’s face and ruffled her hair. Jellybean flew over them, slamming into the monster with a great crash of metal on stony flesh. The two of them tumbled away, their wrestling lit by Jellybean’s eyes, a spotlight bearing down on the writhing, clawing thing that sounded so much like Archie Andrews.

            Toni got to her feet, pulling Cheryl up with her. They watched Jellybean and the monster tearing at each other. Toni was unsure of what to do, how to intervene without being crushed between the two superhuman bodies crashing together. The sound of the bone white claws on Jellybean’s chassis was agonizing, ten thousand razor sharp nails on ten thousand chalkboards, a scream for all those the monster had killed. Jellybean responded with a crushing blow to his chest, one that would have flattened an ordinary person. The monster only flinched.

            “What do we do, Toni?” Cheryl said. “What can we do?”

            Toni touched her pocket, feeling for the square of paper she’d folded in there so many hours ago. “I have a secret weapon. I didn’t want to use it on anyone, but…”

            “Whatever he is, he’s not a one, not a person,” said Cheryl firmly. “What does it do?”

            “It…strips carbon out of organic beings. Turns it to charcoal basically. In your body,” Toni said. She remembered the day she and Jughead came up with the idea. They argued back and forth whether it was right, whether it was evenly vaguely ethical to dismember someone at the atomic level like that. Toni had argued against it, said they should wait and see whether that kind of thing was really necessary. And now here she was, holding the transmutation circle in her hand and ready to use it. And where was Jughead? Off on a woodsy walkabout somewhere.

            “Jellybean!” Cheryl shouted, the girl’s grey head turning back to them in response. “Hold him still!”

            Hearing this, the monster wriggled wildly, like a worm between two fingers, desperate to put some distance between himself and Jellybean. She caught him by the arm and squeezed, dragging his twisting body back towards Toni and Cheryl. He clawed at Jellybean with his free arm, but she caught hold of it too, pinning both his arms behind his back. Jellybean’s servos creaked with the effort of restraining him.

            Toni took one step forward, then another. She looked down at her shoes. They were soaked in blood, the fabric already starting to grow crunchy as it dried. Toni walked faster now, closing in on her enemy. He squirmed before her, snapping his teeth and kicking his feet, but Toni ignored it. He was trying too hard, posturing. If he could really hurt her now, he would. They were not even half a meter apart, Toni glaring up into his empty white eyes.

            “This is for everyone you killed here today,” she said, and pressed the transmutation circle to his chest. Energy poured out of her and into the symbol, and then from the symbol into the monster’s body, blue sparks jumping along his skin. It was the skin that began to change, in fact, flaking away with a newfound brittleness, crumbling wherever he moved. Beneath it, flesh, raw, clayish, and skinned, hissed as it hit the air. Toni withdrew, returning the transmutation circle to her pocket. This wasn’t exactly what she and Jughead imagined when they drew up the circle for the first time. But it did look painful.

            The monster thrashed and wailed, which only made the crisis worse, the charcoal skin peeling away like a terrible sunburn. Toni watched, noticing the strange texture of his flesh: it was bloodless, but deep red, and a consistent texture all throughout, not a single vein, or muscle, or tendon visible. It was not anything like the human bodies she was used to seeing in pieces.

            The more the monster screamed, the more his face began to peel. Even the colorless eyes and fangs flaked away, revealing familiar, human eyes. It was Archie under there, face skinless and crushed by pain, all knots and wrinkles.

            “What happened to you, Archie?” Toni said, drawing closer again, desperate to disprove what her eyes were telling her. “You’re a tool, but I didn’t think you were a murderer.”

            Archie’s eyes were wide with terror and panic. He opened his mouth, then snapped it shut, head twisting from one side to the other, shoulders jumping up convulsively. Finally he spoke, his voice tiny and delicate. He sounded like he ought to be a cartoon mouse, Toni thought, or something else just as weak and sad. Not like the Archie she had known before, and not at all like the Archie threatening her just minutes before. “Toni, I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry. It isn’t me in control. They did something to me, the Lodges, and I’m not human anymore. I’m not myself either.”

            “Then who and what are you, Archie?” Cheryl demanded, taking up a position at Toni’s side. “And no funny business, or we’ll have Jellybean crush you like an ant.”

            “There’s another person in control of my body, another Archie. He calls himself Greed, and he works for the Lodges and this other guy, his Father. They’re the ones behind everything, and they’ve got a plan for Riverdale. But I don’t knowArchie, Archie, Archie. You’re spilling company secrets.” Everything about Archie changed, without anything changing at all. It was the scariest thing Toni had ever seen. His face relaxed, but his eyes narrowed and contempt flooded his tone. He was another person entirely, and even with him hanging limply strung up between Jellybean’s two huge hands he radiated malevolence.

            “You’re the other Archie, I take it,” said Toni, refusing to break eye contact, though every instinct told her to turn and run as far and as fast as possible.

            “I prefer Greed. It’s a more honest assessment of my qualities, or singular quality, that is.” He was disgustingly pleased with himself for the minor wordplay, and on an impulse Toni reached out and flicked his bare, skinless arm. He flinched, but so did Toni. The texture was intensely disturbing. She expected it to be damp, hot, sticky the way a wound was, but Greed’s flesh was rough, dry, and malleable, like a sponge unused for days.

            “That hurt,” he said, pouting with more irony and humor than Archie managed even on his best days. Proof enough that it wasn’t Archie running the show, that was for sure.

            “You’re one of those creatures, like Nick St. Clair and Penelope Blossom,” said Toni, remembering Jughead and Veronica’s matching horror stories.

            “What’s Penelope Blossom?” Cheryl interjected. “Is my Medusa-like mother up to something new?”

            “Your mother’s exceeded the bonds of mere humanity, Cheryl Bombshell,” Greed said, smiling as he strained forward against Jellybean’s grip, drawing his face as close to Toni and Cheryl’s as he could. Toni noticed that Greed’s skin was slowly growing back, sparking blue like alchemy, tiling over his body in small rectangular planks, inorganic in their neatness. She retreated from him a few steps, drawing Cheryl back with her.

            “What do you want, Greed?” Toni asked, heart thudding in her chest.

            “Besides everything-.” Greed stopped. His adam’s apple bobbed and his mouth flapped. He might have been choking, except what finally came up from his throat was Archie’s tiny broken voice. “I just really want my dad back. And my friends. I’ve been so lonelyPathetic, isn’t he?” Greed’s voice shattered Archie’s. It shouldn’t be possible for someone to be interrupted so brutally by their own voice, Toni thought. Greed seemed to take pleasure in hurting Archie that way, driving him back into a corner with mockery coming from Archie’s own throat. “Look, sister,” said Greed, turning his attention back to Toni.

            “Don’t call me sister.”

            “Look, Ms. Topaz.” Greed bounced the part of his face that should have eyebrows suggestively. His face was slowly being recovered with the black carbon shell, his eyes themselves on the brink of disappearing beneath it. “You’re not all that important to the overall vision of Riverdale. You’re annoying, sure. But we’re not going to come looking for you on Ascension Day. If you ran, if you survived crossing the county line, we wouldn’t follow. Why not just go?”

            Toni ignored him, his plea showing more weakness on his part than revealing any new weakness of hers. “What’s Ascension Day? Who do you need for it?”

            Greed sighed. “You should have at least thought it over. You won’t even get the honor of being food. Just compost.”

            “I swear,” said Cheryl. “Every jerk in this whole town thinks the world wants to hear his manifesto, like he’s Heath Ledger’s Joker or something.” She leaned in to glare directly into Greed’s newly blanked out eyes. “Why so serious, loser?”

            Everything after that happened so quickly Toni always remembered it all as simultaneous. Greed snapped at Cheryl like a feral dog, white fangs passing within inches of the tip of Cheryl’s nose. Jellybean flinched forward to restrain him, but in shifting her body she shifted her grip, and Greed did not hesitate to squirm free. He spun and ducked, avoiding Jellybean’s attempt to catch hold of him again, and clawed at her throat, where a few of her most vital wires hung exposed, like the arteries on a human body. His claws slashed through them, leaving a white halo of sparks in his wake. Jellybean’s eyelights went out. A strange noise burst forth from Jellybean’s speaker, a single note, high-pitched and prolonged. It was a scream, though Toni couldn’t tell if it was one of pain or simply rage.

            “Toni, run!” A coda to her scream, barely audible over the hiss and pop of sparking wires, was all Jellybean could muster, but it was enough. Toni grabbed Cheryl’s hand and they ran up the hill, bouncing off dirt soldiers and tripping over each other’s feet, clawing their way over tangled roots and ankle-breaking divots in the earth.

            As they crested the hill, Toni glanced back. She could barely see Jellybean and Greed, but the bone white claws caught the moonlight, and so did the colorless faces of Jellybean’s lightless eyes. The screech of metal sheering apart reached her ears even that far away. Toni shivered. Would she see Jellybean again?

            Cheryl tugged on her hand, gesturing towards the bottom of the hill and the deepening forest. “Toni, come on! If he catches up to us-.”

            Toni didn’t need Cheryl to finish the sentence. She squeezed Cheryl’s hand, and followed her down the hillside. Under the trees was a new and true kind of darkness, unparalleled oblivion. Cheryl was a grey ghost in front of her, muted by the shadows as if behind a heavy black veil. Sharp sticks scraped at Toni’s legs as they ran, snapping under her feet and cracking against the earth. She wondered if they would be better off slowing down and keeping quiet, but Greed’s face as he silenced Archie, the hunger in his expression as he snapped at Cheryl, these memories convinced Toni that distance was the priority, not stealth.

            Toni and Cheryl ran together through the darkness, and even tripping on roots and taking a tumble or two, they made good time. That’s what it felt like, at least. Toni wasn’t sure where they were or where they were going. Going to the Probationary Academy, Jellybean lit the way, and Fangs watched over the map, Sweet Pea holding the flashlight for him. Toni usually carried a flashlight on her belt, but reaching down now, she realized it was gone, lost among the carnage back at the prison fence.

            Was that where Fangs and Sweet Pea were too? Or were they among those who escaped Greed’s wrath? Toni hoped so, more than anything in the world, she hoped that her two friends were somewhere in this forest too. Maybe they were already back at the Serpents’ camp. She and Cheryl would arrive there, scratched up and exhausted, only to find Sweet Pea and Fangs lounging by the fire, enjoying some of Old Deuteronomy’s weak tea, maybe being patched up by Doc. Sweet Pea would crack a joke-

No.

            Toni stopped the fantasy there, because it was coming apart at the seams anyway. The first thing Sweet Pea and Fangs would notice was Jellybean’s absence, and they would ask. What kind of answer was there to give them? Another Serpent lost after another plan fell apart because the Lodges and their Gargoyle King were always one or two or ten steps ahead, with their superhuman soldiers and their layers of evil plans and their Ascension Day, whatever that might turn out to be.

            They couldn’t be beat. That was the easy answer. Greed was right, she and Cheryl should keep running, all the way over the county line and out into the world. But Toni had no idea what was out there. TV, movies, that was all she knew beyond Riverdale, and they didn’t paint a picture of a hospitable world, let alone one that she and Cheryl could handle alone. Rootless and unknown, the two of them didn’t have anything to their names except the clothes they were wearing now, and Toni had a feeling no one could get far that way.

            So it was worth pretending, at least for the moment, that the Lodges could be beaten, that the fight was still worth fighting. Where to take the fight next? Where to make the biggest impact?

            The last time she went to Riverdale proper, before the Serpents had to scatter, before these monster-people showed up, Toni shot a whole reel of protests, labor activists from SoDale Industrial Complex trying to stir people up against the way they were treated there. Few people managed to get in and out of SoDale, and it impressed Toni that these agitators made it over or under the walls. From what they said, there was an entire second Riverdale’s worth of people locked up in there, working away on everything that made Riverdale tick.

            The thought grew up in Toni’s head fully formed and seamless: what if the unrest in SoDale got out of control? What if the walls came down?

            “Toni…” Cheryl’s voice pulled Toni back to the present. She had stopped, resting with one hand against a tree trunk. Toni guessed it was a tree trunk anyway. It was hard to say in such thick darkness. She put her hand up against it, running her fingers over the bark. One of the huge, old-growth trees in the central forest, she guessed. Each strip of bark was as wide as a person’s finger.

            “Toni, where do we go now?” Cheryl whispered. “I can’t see. I don’t know where we are.” She was shaking, the motion very small, but Toni could hear it in her voice too, a restrained terror. Reaching out with both arms, Toni held Cheryl to her, squeezing gently.

            “I think I know about where we are, but we’re going to have to wait until we can see to get back to camp. I dropped my flashlight on the way out. Okay?” Toni reached up and put a hand to Cheryl’s face. Cheryl pressed her face against Toni’s palm, and she felt hot tears streaking down Cheryl’s cheeks. Toni guided Cheryl to sit at the base of the tree, the two of them curled together in the nighttime chill. They leaned against the tree like it was the softest sofa they’d ever enjoyed.

            “I’m so glad to be with you again, T.T. Being in there without you for so long, without anyone I could trust, it was like starving to death,” Cheryl said, resting her cheek against the top of Toni’s head.

            “You don’t have to worry about that ever again.” Toni pressed her face into Cheryl’s neck, kissing it once lightly. “Not ever again.”

            “You still have my bow, don’t you?”

            “Uh, yes, of course,” said Toni, wondering at the sudden change of subject. “It’s in the Serpents armory.”

            “Good.” Cheryl kissed Toni on the top of the head. Toni shivered at the tickle on her hairline. “Because the first thing I’m going to do when we get back to camp is hunt Greed down and string him up. Is that alright with you?”

            Toni smiled. “Not a problem. Not a problem at all.”

            “Love you, T.T.”

            “I love you, Cheryl.”

            Silence crept up over them, soft and warm. Toni was drifting off, she knew it, and she decided to let it happen. Cheryl would watch for them both. Cheryl rarely slept, and she certainly didn’t sleep outside. It was safe, for at least a few moments.

            With a sense of incredible relief, Toni let her eyes shut, the darkness inside her so much more welcoming than the darkness outside. When she woke up, it would be light enough to find the Serpents’ camp. She would have a plan, a place to go, and the certainty of what she would do when she got there.

            When she woke up, everything would be different.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: Betty and her friends cross the county line, and their quest for answers about the true purpose and form of Riverdale leads them back to their darkest memories. For some of us, the Sweetwater Engagement never ended...
> 
> Next update: 9/27/2019


	11. Greendale

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Betty, Jughead, Veronica, and Kevin step over the Riverdale city limits and visit Greendale, the enemy in the war that caused them all so much pain. What they find in Greendale leaves them with a renewed certainty that they must make change in their hometown.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this chapter is late! I swung through two unexpected Not Riverdale hyperfixations while writing this, which slowed me down. This chapter was also just very difficult to write. The content is challenging. Everyone reckons with their trauma to one degree or another, and they encounter many casualties of the Sweetwater Engagement. The cost of war is high.

The closer Betty got to the city limits, the slower she walked. It wasn’t a conscious decision on her part, just a half-buried animal reluctance to go beyond the edge of the known world. In any other town, it would be strange and embarrassing that she’d never left the city limits, but she knew from looking at her friends’ faces that none of them had ever crossed this boundary before either, no matter how much Veronica liked to talk about New York, Paris, and LA.

Besides, Betty reminded herself, if what FP claimed about the world was really true, then there might not be any other towns full of more worldly people at all. There were citizens of Riverdale who’d moved in within Betty’s lifetime, and now that she thought about it, they were always strangely reticent about their lives before. They spoke of what was great about Riverdale or they didn’t speak at all.

Hazy memories, like something dreamed, coalesced in Betty’s mind: she and Jughead wandering through the South Side Academy, crawling through a mass grave, Jughead telling her about a Serpent from LA who’d said it was post-apocalyptic out there. Jughead treated it like an exaggeration, a _Demolition Man_ , “This Is 1996” bit of urban blight hyperbole. Now Betty wondered if that Serpent might have meant exactly what he said.

They approached the Sweetwater Bridge, Veronica striding ahead, Kevin, Jughead, and Betty strung out behind her like a nervous gaggle of goslings. Thanks to her parents’ influence, Veronica didn’t see any of the Sweetwater combat, never came to the front. She never crouched behind sandbags on this very bridge, burning all over with tension and terror, until the first shots came. It showed. She was the same person as always, nerves wrapped in a thick layer of self-assurance. It wasn’t false confidence, it was too genuine and fearsome. It was the confidence of the unharmed, a confidence buoyed by a lack of brutal times and places. Veronica never huddled for an entire bloody summer’s day on the Sweetwater Bridge, never clutched at a gun like it was the key to her heart.

Betty remembered every minute she’d spent on this bridge. Her hands prickled with nervous sweat. She clenched her fists, digging her nails into the palms of her hands, letting the memories pass through her in a loop of pain, born in her brain, running down her arms, and tearing into the open half-moon wounds on her palms. They dissipated back into her bloodstream that way, flowing into her heart and up to her brain, reborn there to start the cycle over again.

The bridge itself hummed with ghosts and horrors. Everywhere she looked there were pock marks in the concrete and asphalt, echoes of bullets fired long ago. She could almost hear them, the ping of a ricochet on concrete and the thud of one finding its soft, receptive mark.

The river water beneath them was a rich grey-blue, not at all like the muddy swimming hole of Betty’s childhood. It too was alive with vengeance and bad memory, crashing against the bridge’s supports with malicious force. She hated that river. She hated both of its banks and every square meter of ground that ran along it. She hated this bridge. Betty leaned out over the railing. Her ponytail slipped along her neck, dangling far above the water, fluttering in the wind, just like her empty right sleeve, pinned up with care by Veronica that morning before they left the Keller Cabin.

FP was still there at the cabin, as far as anyone knew. Kevin asked him two or three times whether he had plans about where to go next, getting less and less polite each time, but FP remained blandly stalwart on his intention to stay just right where he was. As they left, they heard the sound of a beer cracked open in the living room, prompting a tiny, wounded sound from Jughead.

Betty turned away from the water, looking for Jughead. He was standing between Veronica and Kevin, staring up at a painted sign posted on the bridge’s edge. “You are now leaving RIVERDALE, the town with PEP!” stared back down at them in yellow, grandly serifed letters. The sign’s backdrop promised lush pine forests, towering snow-capped mountains, and cute little houses covered in clapboard siding. Which was not a lie. All those things could be found in Riverdale, if you were willing to accept a number of other things which didn’t appear on the sign.

Betty drew closer to the sign, taking up a place beside Kevin. He glanced over at her and smiled, a cheerful expression drawn like curtains across a shadowed stage. “Feeling peppy this morning, Betty?”

“Never peppier.”

“Right past that sign is where Riverdale ends,” said Jughead, pointing just a few meters away. “When we step over that invisible line, everything’s going to change. We’ll know if anything my dad told us is true.”

“He made it seem like leaving the city limits is dangerous,” Veronica said, running her fingers through her hair, pulling it back and away from her face. It ran down her back, and Betty noticed it was longer and messier than it had ever been before, knotted and tangled in several places. Veronica was growing strange and wild, just like the rest of them.

“Yeah, but as usual he didn’t feel like giving us any handy details.” Kevin crossed his arms across his chest. “It was your standard ‘hey, kids, the world ended, you’re all actually brainwashed adults, and everyone wants you dead for weird, occult purposes’ rundown.”

“Only one way to find out what happens, I guess.” Jughead stepped forward, leaving the others behind. As he passed the sign, he slowed down, leaning into every step as if climbing a steep hill. He pressed himself against the air, dragging his feet forward one after the other. Betty hated to watch, recognizing the look of strangled pain on his face, so she followed him.

The first step past the sign was just like normal. It was the second one that made the world turn sour and inhospitable. As soon as the solid majority of Betty’s body was beyond the Pep sign, the air turned gelatinous, crushing against her skin, forcing her backwards. Her eyes hurt from pressing back into her skull, her mouth stretched back over her teeth, exposing them to a cold, painful wind that came from nowhere.

Betty’s pulse filled her ears, thudding faster and faster until a bomb of red and white pain went off beside her eardrums, a noise so loud and terrible she thought the world had ended.

The air thinned out around her, and she went stumbling forward through empty space, all resistance gone. Betty caught herself before she fell, and looked back. She had moved all of two meters in her agony, and behind her Veronica and Kevin were locked in the same torture, faces and bodies contorted against the unbearable pressure being exerted upon them.

Jughead was slumped against the bridge’s railing, only half-standing. He panted heavily, the ragged breaths sounding raw and painful. Blood ran down the sides of his face from his ears and instinctively Betty touched her own cheeks, finding the same red trails crawling across her skin.

“Was that it?” she asked, trying to find the right volume, afraid her eardrums were burst. Jughead looked up, eyes wide and wet. Never before had she seen him look so afraid.

“I hope so. I hope so, because I can’t do that again any time soon.” He let his face sink into his hands. “I could feel the metal in my arm and leg bending. That’s how hard it was trying to hold us back.”

With a tremendous exhalation, Veronica fell forward into normal air, Kevin close behind her. They were both shaking, both bleeding, and both wide-eyed and terrified.

“Okay, that sucked,” said Kevin, gesturing back to the invisible barrier. “Anybody else concerned our skulls might pop when we try to go back?”

That was a thought that hadn’t crossed Betty’s mind until now: what if it was a one-way trip? A rush of illicit pleasure washed the pain out of her, her mind buzzing with the possibility. No more Riverdale, Murder Dad, Monster Chic. Even if everyone else in the world was dead a hundred years or more, who else did she need besides Jughead, Veronica, and Kevin? A whole empty world their oyster, that was a fantasy she hadn’t known she needed. That would be a beautiful life.

Of course, she’d be trading in the lives of everyone in Riverdale for it.

The cost was too high, she told herself. But imagining the home she could have with her friends, free of all bad memories and evil days, it was hard not to choke on her own desperate desire.

“So where do we go from here?” asked Veronica, dabbing at her bloodied ears with a white monogrammed hanky that she produced from nowhere. “I imagine Greendale must be close by, though how you carried out an invasion with that barrier in the way is beyond me.”

“We never had boots on the ground in Greendale,” said Jughead, staring down the road, which faded gently away into gray fogged nothingness. “That was the worst part.”

“Not the worst part, exactly,” Betty countered, but quietly.

Jughead frowned, shoving his hands into his pockets, rolling forward onto the balls of his feet. “Not the worst part overall. The worst part strategically. The Sweetwater Engagement was supposed to be a defensive action only, but we poured kids into it like it was the last hurrah of our dying empire.”

“Like we were defending holy ground,” said Betty, folding her arms over her chest, trying to hold in the screams and cries and dying sounds that drowned her memories.

“Now it’s pretty cursed ground, I’d say.” Kevin surveyed the riverbank, the rushing river, the forking road, with a critical eye. It was so fog-drenched that there really wasn’t very much to see. “You can’t have that much death in any place without leaving a mark.”

Another memory reared its ugly head, reminding Betty of something Chic and Penelope talked about at South Side Academy. “Or a crest.”

“The crest of blood!” Jughead’s whole body carried out his tonal shift, his spine straightening, enthusiasm bringing him back to liveliness. “This was one of the points on the town-wide transmutation circle.”

“Which we still don’t know the purpose of,” Veronica said in a warning tone, trying to restrain Jughead to the realm of moderate enthusiasm rather than the ecstasy of a mystery nearly solved.

“I’m sure we’ll find out on Ascension Day,” said Betty, rolling forward to put all her weight on her toes. Balanced precariously there for a moment, she could detach herself from the present, the distraction of staying upright clearing her mind. She chewed on the phalanx of questions that confronted them: What was Ascension Day? What was the giant transmutation circle for? Were they the last survivors of a post-apocalyptic hellscape?

Did any of this matter?

Betty found it hard to say. Here on this bridge, remembering every miserable moment spent at war, concerns about alchemy and actuality were distant. All that really mattered in this place was the blood and the agony it had played host to, and why such a sacrifice was made. Who benefitted? Maybe, if she was lucky, the answer to that question would be tangled up with the rest of this investigation. She didn’t want to imagine going the rest of her life without these answers. It would be like living with a permanent open wound.

“I think Greendale’s down the right-hand path,” said Kevin, taking one step in that direction but no more, looking back at his friends with a clear request in his eyes.

“That tracks,” Betty said, climbing out of the ever-widening pit in her mind, but only after some effort. “With the way we used to prime the artillery and all.”

“Then let’s get going. We didn’t push through that Ghost Fence to stand around in vague mourning like we’re a film of the French New Wave.” Once again Veronica took the lead, walking straight past Kevin, following the cracked asphalt as it led off along the riverbank.

Betty tried to follow, she really did, but her legs were alternately stone and jelly, immobile but on the edge of collapse. What would be in Greendale? What would be left of Greendale?

Veronica looked back and saw her friends hadn’t moved. She waved them to her, her expression so stern and yet shot through with so much compassion that Betty could imagine exactly what kind of a mother Veronica would be. “Come on, Godard, Truffaut, Bresson! Time waits for no one, no matter how you play with editing and cinematic linearity. We have to get to the bottom of this.”

After one more moment’s hesitation, Betty offered her hand to Kevin. He took it immediately and squeezed. His palm was cold with sweat, and in a few places sticky with blood too. She imagined her own hand felt much the same. Jughead approached on her right, and Betty pulled a face for him, trying to ironize the fact that she didn’t have another hand to give to him. To her surprise, he smiled and put an arm around her waist instead.

The three of them walked to the end of the bridge and down the path to Veronica, whose eyes were unusually bright, catching the light like summer raindrops. She grabbed Kevin’s free hand and pulled them along. “Well, we’re off to see the wizard. Tell me when you’re ready to break into song.”

“Too bad we forgot Toto,” Jughead deadpanned, keeping himself close to Betty, letting the warmth between them grow despite the damp fog.

“Yeah, it’s a shame Reggie isn’t here,” Kevin added. “He so loves to ride around in the little basket too.”

“Maybe next time,” said Veronica, laughing.

Betty shook her head. “Please promise me there’s not going to be a next time. One go-round of overthrowing the government and my own trauma is enough.”

“You’d have to get more trauma,” said Kevin. “Not that that’s hard in Riverdale.”

“Or that you haven’t had your fair share already,” Jughead threw in. His hand brushed against a spot of bare skin where her t-shirt and her pants didn’t quite meet. She shivered, feeling his fingerprints pressing on her senses. It was the best feeling in the world, even now, when she thought she might drown in fear and sorrow.

“What did the Gargoyle King say?” Kevin tilted his head back in thought, mouth curved in like a Muppet in serious contemplation. “That you’re almost ‘overripe’ with trauma? Not very tactful, huh?”

“That’s what He gets for piling it non-stop,” said Veronica, tossing her head back contemptuously. “I’m going to enjoy roasting Him alive.”

“I’m worried that won’t work,” said Jughead. “My dad said the Gargoyle King is the one who introduced alchemy. What if He can’t be hurt by it?”

Veronica shrugged. “Only one way to find out. And whether or not He can be transmuted directly, I don’t think there’s anybody who’s immune to an inferno like the one I’m planning.”

“What will we do after?” asked Betty.

“After what? After Veronica annihilates the Gargoyle King?” Kevin frowned thoughtfully, tilting his head to one side and then the other as he thought. “I guess that depends on how long and well He burns. I think He’d be great for a weenie roast.”

All of them laughed at the image. Betty remembered when she was very little, a Sweetwater Scouts camping trip. Her dad and Archie’s as the chaperones, all the kids piled into two or three tents. She, Archie, Jughead, and Kevin sat around the fire together, roasting hot dogs and marshmallows, and trying to come up with the spookiest stories they could think of.

“Kev, Jug, do you remember when we went on that camping trip as kids? In the mountains?”

“The one where Archie got mauled by a bear?” asked Jughead. “I can’t forget it, it keeps showing up in my nightmares.”

“No, silly, she means the other one,” interjected Kevin. “Don’t you, Betty? When we were just kids. We had our own tent and everything.”

Betty nodded. “That’s the one. We had the spooky story competition.”

“Oh, that sounds like fun!” said Veronica. “I missed all the cutest kid stuff.”

“Yeah, too bad your parents thought you needed to spend so much time on poise and etiquette like Jane Austen lite,” said Jughead with a snort.

Veronica looked away from him, head tilted back dismissively. “It’s a shame the rest of you didn’t have the chance to develop skills like mine. Not many people can play matchmaker and firestarter all at once, you know.”

“Who won the competition?” broke in Betty, hoping to stop them now before this turned into one of Veronica and Jughead’s little feuds. They had been getting along so well lately that they were due for one of their falling outs, but it was such a pain to deal with them both in that mood. Betty wished she knew a surefire way to shut them down now.

“Wasn’t it Jughead?” said Kevin, picking up on Betty’s idea and pushing the conversation forward. “It seems like it should be Jughead.”

“No, it definitely wasn’t me.” Jughead sighed, drawing out the sound until it became absurdly theatrical. “I remember the crushing disappointment. I almost gave up writing then and there.”

“When was the last time you wrote anything anyway?” Veronica said, going for a low blow that forced Betty to move fast to deflect.

“I think it might have been Archie.”

“Archie?” Kevin grimaced, unwilling or unable to believe her. “Archie has the imagination of a particularly inspired fruit bat.”

“No, I think she’s right,” said Jughead. “I hate to admit it, but I remember him telling a real chiller, going full Lovecraft and Jackson. It was slow and eldritch, and it was really depressing.”

“It was about a house.” The story was reconstituting itself in Betty’s memory, being reassembled brick by brick until it was once again a grand and terrifying edifice. “The house was collapsing a little at a time, one room or one wall crumbling in on itself. Just shrinking day after day.”

“And there was a big family!” Kevin hopped his next stop, buoyant with recovered memories. “They lived in every room, and every time a room collapsed they had to jam in closer together. And they got closer and closer, sharing more and more space.”

“But the closer they got, the angrier and meaner they got.” Jughead’s expression was distant, rapturous even, seeing something they couldn’t see, though Betty wished she could. “Until the house started its final collapse, about to fall in completely. And the adults, the parents, they decided to leave, but they’d grown so hateful of their family that they left the children behind.”

“And when the house fell in…” Betty spoke without thinking, a strange energy running through her that was not her own. “When the house fell in, the children were crushed. They died horrible deaths, the agony and misery were indescribable. And now their ghosts walk the earth, looking for people who are cruel to their families and tearing them apart.”

“Wow. I can’t believe we didn’t see Archie’s heel turn coming, with thoughts like that behind his broad brow,” said Veronica, scanning her friends’ faces for any sense of irony or amusement over Archie’s surprisingly effective campfire tale.

The last thing Betty could imagine feeling was irony or amusement. She felt terrified. Against the horizon, just on the other side of a low rise in the earth, she could see the sharp brown point of a rooftop. Greendale waited, just barely out of sight, and never out of mind. “I think what was worst about it for me was that I wasn’t scared for myself,” she said, overwhelmed by an unexpected desire to unburden herself. “It was that I was scared for my dad. And my mom. I was scared for them to be punished for hurting me. I was scared they’d be stopped from hurting me.”

The quartet stopped walking. They stood, the four of them, in the middle of the wide and shattered road, and let Betty’s words weigh heavy on them.

Finally Jughead spoke. “Me too.” He said it in a whisper, the admission clawing its way out of his chest. “I didn’t want them to come after my dad. But I must have known he deserved it, or I wouldn’t have been afraid.”

“I didn’t know then what scared me about it so much,” Kevin said, shoving his hands in his pockets. “But now I do. Before I came out, I used to get scared that my dad was going to reject me. That if I told him, he’d hate me for…I don’t even know. I hate that I even thought that about him, but I did. And that story…” Kevin hesitated, and Betty squeezed his hand. “When I heard that story, it made me feel weirdly safe, knowing that if he hurt me, he’d get punished. I hated that feeling. I hated needing to imagine someone to protect me from my own dad.”

“Look, I wasn’t there,” said Veronica, putting a hand on Kevin’s shoulder, her dark red nails standing out bright against his brown jacket. “I don’t know everything you went through. But I know that even now, even after seeing my dad try to kill us all, seeing that he’s an evil shadow snake-topus who works for the Gargoyle King, I still wish there was another way. I really, really don’t want to hurt him. Even though he’s done nothing but hurt me.”

“In the next world, we won’t hurt each other like this,” said Betty, staring down at her feet. A tear slipped gently off her cheek and landed on the tip of her shoe, darkening the pink canvas.

Jughead leaned against her, one arm still around her waist, the other across her chest, a hand resting on her shoulder. “The next world?”

“Whatever it is that comes after Riverdale.”

“For the next world, can we all agree that children won’t be currency?” asked Kevin, twining his arm and Betty’s together, pressing their shoulders together. He laid his head against hers, and she listened to the sound of his breathing, which was thickened by tears just like hers.

“For the next world, can we all agree that the aesthetic will be a little more glam, a little less Fifties glazed ham?” Veronica encircled them all in a tight hug, compressing them into the very limited space she could reach.

“What does that even mean?” Jughead said, muffled by a mouthful of Veronica’s hair.

She pulled back to stare at him skeptically, eyebrows raised. “The first thing it means is that you’re getting over that James Dean look. It’s been done, buddy. Find your own style.”

Jughead opened his mouth, about to argue, and Betty dragged him back in. “I love you guys,” she said, looking from one to the next, feeling the fierce heat of her affection pouring off her skin. “None of us would have gotten this far without each other, and I want to hold onto that when we go into Greendale. So no bickering for just one more minute, please.”

Veronica said “Of course, Bee,” exactly as Jughead said “As you wish.”

“Great,” said Betty, and pulled them all back together for one last crushing hug.

After they broke apart, Betty still clung to the love she had for them, following its roots all the way to the bottom of her heart and making a place there to rest among its tendrils. She knew she would need that sanctuary badly now. Greendale was coming into full view.

What should you expect from a ruin you helped create? That was what Betty wondered as she and her friends made their way down the hill and along Greendale’s main drag. Nothing looked as it was supposed to, if that made sense. Back in the foxholes on the far side of the river, Betty used to picture Greendale as another Riverdale, an image that made her perversely more willing to rain hellfire down upon the town without asking why.

The Greendale before her now was nothing like Riverdale. It was a sprawling junkyard, hills of trash and rubble collapsing into each other and pouring over the skeletons of long-abandoned homes. Long abandoned before even the Sweetwater bombing campaign, Betty suspected. The gutted wooden frames stood tall and just as gray as the foggy air. The whole place was well and truly dead, but an unquiet kind of dead. A hungry revenant.

The closer they drew to the center of town, the stranger things seemed. The four of them spread apart, crawling over heaps of rubble and picking their way through collapsing houses. It wasn’t anything like they’d been told before Sweetwater, the endless briefings with Minetta and Kevin’s dad filling them in on the enemy and their habits. In that version of the story, Greendale was a prosperous equal to Riverdale, just as well-off and well-inhabited, and now growing too fast and too greedy, threatening to spill over the riverbank and into Riverdale’s sovereign territory.

The more she repeated the story to herself, the more Betty thought it sounded completely stupid. “Why did we believe them?” she asked aloud, more to the piles of debris and the tumbledown ruins than to her friends themselves.

“Believe who?” asked Kevin at the same time Jughead said “Because we were stupid.”

“Why did we believe Minetta and your dad and the Lodges when they told us that Greendale was our enemy? When did we ever even see someone from Greendale? A soldier or an attacker or any person at all?”

“Oh. That.” Kevin bent down and scooped up a handful of pale, dry dirt, letting it run through his fingers. “Probably because we’d never done anything else. You get used to it, believing people. Especially people with power. I still always want to believe my dad. Even after everything FP told us, if my dad came out from behind that pile of trash and said ‘Son, I can explain,” I’d want to listen.”

“But I wasn’t used to listening to the Lodges. I was always investigating them, always trying to dig up dirt on them.” As she spoke, Betty watched Kevin turn his hand over, the dirt falling halfway back to earth before it disappeared into the low wind. “But it wasn’t until after the war, after I broke completely, that I started to question it.”

“I think it’s the veiled threat,” said Jughead, taking a seat on an overturned garbage can, leaning back against the only mailbox on the whole street still standing upright. “The implied assertion that there’s an existential threat to our way of life always drives people into a frenzy, and keeps them from realizing that our way of life is completely corrupt anyway.”

“What’s worse, do you think?” said Kevin, sitting down on the trashcan next to Jughead. “We find out that this place was empty the whole time and we went to war against a Potemkin Village, or we know for sure we were instrumental in the deaths of an unknowable number of unknown people whose faces we’ll never see?”

“I think it’s too late to make distinctions like that,” Betty told him, staring up at the veiled white orb of the fog-hidden sun. “We destroyed this place. We got hurt and if anyone was over here they got hurt too. And we did it all to safeguard a regime that’s intent on torturing us and cannibalizing our pain for its own ends.”

“Not to mention everyone trapped inside SoDale Village.” Veronica stood on top of a large trash heap a few meters away, feet planted apart like a popstar on her album cover. She held something in her hand and waved it very gently at them. Rippling in the breeze it became recognizable as a magazine. “All those people whose names we don’t even know, who we’ve never even seen.”

“Developing an activist streak, Veronica?” Jughead called up to her, a little note of mockery in his tone, superiority that pointed to itself and said “I cared before you did”.

Veronica smiled back at him, blatantly insincere. “Sorry to interrupt your little philosophers’ meet-up, but I found something in one of the ruins that I think you all need to see.” She came skipping down the hill, stumbling and catching herself more than once. Each time Veronica slipped Betty flinched forward to help her, and then wondered what exactly she could do to keep her friend from falling. Betty’s own balance was still off, still adjusting to her new asymmetry.

Safely on her feet at the foot of the hill, Veronica offered the magazine to Betty, who took it carefully, spreading her hands out across the delicate softness of the aged paper. It was a surprisingly wonderful texture, reminding her of long hours spent in the school library doing research, getting lost in old stories that felt so fresh and important that they could have happened yesterday. That had been a nice life, for all its terrible frustrations and twists. The Betty before Sweetwater could have been happy as a small-town investigator, just like her mom, unearthing all the bounded, knowable wrongs in Riverdale and never worrying about the bigger, invisible wrongs that threatened to swallow up all of reality. Except the first kind of wrong was always the child of the second, and the farther she went up the family tree, the closer she got to the world-denying evils, like the Gargoyle King.

Betty turned her attention to the magazine in her hands. It was very old, she knew that before she even saw the date on its cover. And until a few days ago she wouldn’t have believed that date anyway. The weathered, shriveled bundle of paper there in her hands claimed to be the September 2025 issue of _Time_ magazine. Both pieces of information were difficult to swallow. Not only did she still find it hard to believe they lived in a year not so far from 2100, the only magazine like this Betty ever came across in Riverdale was _Lives_ magazine. It had the same color scheme, the same logo, the same look, but she knew the title was different. The issue in her hands felt like a bizarre parody, if only she could figure out why anyone would think it was funny to make a knock-off newsmagazine.

Veronica pointed to the headline splashed across the front cover, captioning a picture of a storm-wracked coast, assailed by a deluge that bent trees in half and tossed deck chairs like birthday balloons. The accompanying text was over-obvious, but Betty knew why Veronica thought it was important. In white, still-searing letters it read “THE BIG WAVE – Why Immanent Climate Crash Spells Bad News For Everyone On This Coast”. Betty wondered why anyone would need to be sold on something so important, something that ought to be common knowledge.

“So that’s one for my dad right off the bat,” said Jughead, leaning over Betty’s shoulder to examine the magazine. “Unless this is a really elaborate fake, the present is definitely not the 2018 we thought it was.”

“Pretty sure it’s not any kind of 2018 at all,” Kevin said, prodding Jughead’s trashcan with the tip of his shoe. Something thudded inside of it and Kevin leaned over to peer inside. Whatever his eyes landed on, he didn’t like it, reeling back, tripping over his own feet, and landing hard on his back, legs in the air. It would have been cartoonish except for the look of horror and disgust on Kevin’s face.

“What is it?” Betty said, offering him her hand and helping him back up.

“There’s somebody dead in there.” Kevin gnawed on his lower lip between every sentence, forcing the facts out. “Dead for a long time. They’re just bones. But they’re…they’re really small bones. I don’t know if there was anyone else in this whole miserable town, but I know that’s someone who shouldn’t have died. Especially not in a trashcan.”

Jughead knelt, staring into the dark pit. Betty watched him as he stood and took off his beanie, holding it crumpled in his right hand while he ran the left through his hair. Jughead’s eyes were wide and scared. “Kevin’s right. We should do something.”

“There’s not much more we can do at this point,” Betty pointed out. “Whoever they were, they’re just like all those bodies in the South Side Academy. They’re beyond our help.”

“We could bury them,” Veronica suggested. “It isn’t much, but it will tell people who come by here, if anyone ever does, that someone cared. That somebody remembered that person as a person, not just a pile of bones.”

“Thank you, Veronica,” Betty said, a lump rising in her throat, squeezing her words until they could barely be heard. “I’m really glad you’re here. I don’t think we could do this by ourselves.”

Veronica took Betty’s hand with both of hers. “I know, Bee. I know this is hard. But this is one more step to making sure something like this never happens again. You, Jughead, and Kevin are making an incredible sacrifice being here and facing this stuff down. I got to stay home in my Blair Waldorf paradise while you guys were here, so if I have to take point now, it’s not so much to ask.”

“You’re the best, Vee,” said Kevin.

“Thank you, Veronica,” added Jughead, though he looked at his feet while he said it.

“Let’s go find somewhere nice to put this person.” Veronica gestured over the heaps of rubble. “There’s more space on the other side of this, where I found that magazine. Can you two take the trashcan?” she asked, looking at Jughead and Kevin with a tight, apologetic expression.

“Yeah.” Jughead took one handle and Kevin took the other, though he hesitated for a second, hand hovering over the little metal bar, as if touching it would wake up whoever it was at rest in there.

Veronica led the way over the hill of trash, helped Betty, offering her a stabilizing hand whenever she stumbled. Kevin and Jughead followed, wobbling from side to side with the trashcan between them. Every time the bones were jostled, they hit the walls of the can with soft, resonant rumbles, and everyone flinched.

Before them sprawled a miserable sight, worse than the first view they’d had of Greendale. There were no more of the old houses left on this side of the heap, but there were many craters, scattered with chunks of debris that could have once been house or furniture or tree or really anything, but were nothing now except trash. Betty shivered. This was where all those blindly fired mortars must have landed.

Veronica pointed to a spot just at the foot of the heap on which they stood, a little lean-to with no door or back wall, just a few boards against a rock. “That’s where I found the magazine. I don’t think anyone had been in there for a while, there wasn’t anything to sleep on, no food or water. Just an old backpack with that inside and a couple other old books.”

“Anything I haven’t read?” said Jughead, trying to keep his tone light and curious even as the trashcan thudded against his leg.

“No, they were mystery paperbacks, Elmore Leonard and Agatha Christie. I know you’ve read those,” Veronica replied, glancing back with a small smile. She held up a hand to Jughead, who was about to speak. “Yes, I have heard your Elmore Leonard speech, and yes, I agree _Jackie Brown_ is a better movie than it gets credit for, primarily because it wasn’t a Tarantino original.”

“I didn’t think you paid that much attention to anything I said.” Jughead sounded genuinely surprised, hopping down the hillside behind them, Kevin trying to keep pace and keep his grip on the trashcan.

“I happen to agree that _Pulp Fiction_ is overrated, is all,” Veronica called back to Jughead. “I mean, really he’s just always making the same movie over and over again with different decorations. Like, get it over it and accept you can’t compete with a real masterpiece. Like _Heathers_. That was a film worth making.”

“I doubt Tarantino’s still around to repent,” pointed out Kevin. “If we’re going to believe FP and it really is 2098 and after the climate apocalypse, then he probably went down with everybody else.”

“It would be funny if he still was making movies, though,” mused Jughead. “Somewhere out in California he’s straining away at his next picture like ‘This is going to be my grindhouse masterpiece, guys!’ and everybody else is like ‘Quentin, we don’t need a grindhouse masterpiece. It’s the apocalypse, every day is a grindhouse masterpiece out here!’” Jughead giggled at the thought and, despite everything, Betty smiled.

So did Veronica. “I think that’s the single longest statement you’ve ever made to me or Kevin, Jughead.”

“What can I say?” he replied, shrugging and then wincing as the shrug set the trashcan’s morbid contents rumbling again. “I have a passion for the cinema.” He sighed, shaking his head. “If there’s no more electricity or DVDs after we defeat the Gargoyle King, I’m going to be really sad.”

“Maybe that just means it’s time for the print renaissance you always told me you were waiting for,” Betty suggested. “Film doesn’t need technically need electricity.” She stumbled a bit as she picked her way across the thin strip of ground between two craters, and Veronica caught hold of her left shoulder and steadied her.

“Maybe.” Jughead frowned. “I don’t know I feel about the extreme flammability of film though. I don’t want my post-apocalyptic movie palace to go all _Towering Inferno_ on opening night.” Jughead caught himself as he yanked backward, held in place by Kevin, who had come to a sudden stop beside one of the craters.

“Kev?” said Veronica, turning back when she heard Jughead stop short.

Betty followed Kevin’s gaze with her own and saw what had caught his eye. One of the craters wasn’t a crater at all. It was a little shelter, sunken into the ground, only distinguishable from the other depressions by the round metal porthole at its bottom. The porthole was open, but revealed nothing of the interior, only flat darkness.

They gathered at the edge of the hole, staring down into it.

“Should we-.” Kevin started to ask and then cut himself off, shaking his head. “No, we definitely shouldn’t. Right? We definitely shouldn’t?”

“We have to,” Betty said, already making to slide down the crater’s side to the hole. Jughead caught her with a hand on the shoulder.

“We should be careful. This could be a trap, the shelter itself could be booby-trapped, there could be people waiting in the other craters to seal us in there.”

“Jughead’s right,” said Veronica. “Two of us will go in and two of us will stay up here. And if anything’s funny down there, the two down there will come right out.”

“Funny haha or funny scary?” Kevin asked. “Because I don’t know when the last time was that anything in our lives was funny haha, and I could really use a laugh.”

The darkness pulled on Betty like a magnet. She wanted to feel it wash over her skin and get her out of this place, even momentarily. Disappearance was a kind of absolution. “I’ll go.”

“Then I’ll go with you,” said Jughead, setting down his side of the trashcan and hopping over the lip of the depression to skid down to the porthole. His left foot hit the metal rim with a loud clang and he winced. “So our stealth approach is blown.”

“That’s fine,” said Betty, sliding down to join him. “We’ve got people to watch our backs.”

Veronica nodded down at them. “Give the word and Kevin and I will do whatever you need.”

“In the meantime, we’ll just be here,” said Kevin, sitting down at the edge of the depression and letting his feet dangle over the edge. “Trying not to think about how we’re hauling a trashcan with a child’s skeleton in it across the new Somme.”

“Perfect,” said Jughead. Then he stepped into the darkness, one foot at a time, feeling for a ladder or other foothold. He didn’t need to announce when he made contact because the ladder also let out a loud metal-on-metal crash when his foot connected with it. Jughead blushed. “I promise I’m more stealthy when I’m not dizzy with reawakened war traumas.”

“I know,” said Betty. She leaned forward and pressed her forehead to his. “Will you help me get down there?” she whispered, trying to be so quiet he would feel it instead of hear it.

“Of course,” he whispered back. “I’ll be right there at the bottom waiting for you.”

“Thank you.”

Jughead smiled, and drew away from her, waving to Kevin and Veronica before he descended the ladder and disappeared into darkness.

Betty took hold of the rim of the porthole with her hand and painstakingly levered herself over the edge after Jughead. The first moment with her foot hanging out into the darkness and only one hand anchoring her was completely terrifying, but then she felt Jughead’s hand close on her foot and guide it to the first rung of the ladder. Stable now, Betty swung her other leg over the edge and onto the ladder. Letting go of the porthole, she stepped down, catching herself just before she fell back into the darkness. One step at a time, she made her way down, hopping off the ladder and landing on a brown dirt floor, kicking up a little cloud around her feet.

Betty and Jughead stood together in the small circle of light beneath the porthole and gazed out into the shadows around them.

“Any bright ideas for how we’re going to light this place up?” asked Jughead.

“Don’t you have some alchemical deus ex machina up your sleeve? An aluminum can and a cathode ray TV and a little Macgyver-ing?”

Jughead shrunk inward, leaning up against the ladder and not looking at her. “Truth is, I don’t know if I can do alchemy out here. It doesn’t feel normal” He clapped his hands together and pressed them against the ladder. Nothing happened, not a single blue spark burst up from his fingertips. He looked back at her with a forced smile. “I swear, this has never happened before.”

Betty reached out, lifting his left hand from the ladder and pulling him towards her. “One in five alchemists…” she murmured, Jughead’s expression going all pinched and annoyed as she drew him with her into the dark.

There was just enough light to make out vague shapes before them, here a pillar, there a wall, there a stack of crates or a cot. They felt around as much as they looked, though, Betty running the tips of her toes along the ground before her, and Jughead skimming his free hand through the air and flinching away every time he brushed up against something unexpected.

When Betty’s foot connected with something cylindrical, she slid it under her toes and rolled it back and forth a few times to get a sense of the shape. It was long, it was rounded, and it flared at the end. It felt very like a flashlight and she bent over to reach it, releasing Jughead’s hand.

“Betty?”

“Don’t worry, I think I’ve found the solution to our problem,” she said, fingers closing around the handle. She ran her thumb along its length and found a rubbery button near the flare. Hoping like hell it really was a flashlight and not a grenade or a trigger or something else just her luck, Betty pressed the button.

Light trickled forth from the end of the flashlight, a thin and sickly yellow, but enough to illuminate their surroundings. The shelter was smaller than Betty had pictured it and rectangular. At the far end there was a great collection of pale wooden crates, some open and others still nailed shut. At the other end, where she and Jughead stood, were fifteen cots, arranged in five rows of three each. Every cot had a skeleton or two lying atop it.

“We have got to stop meeting like this,” said Jughead, his face slack and heartbroken.

“What happened? They all just laid down and died?” Betty reached back, offering the flashlight to Jughead. He took it and watched as she ran her fingers along the forehead of the nearest skull. It wasn’t like she’d imagined, the rough-smooth of plastic Halloween decorations. It felt almost delicate, like a ceramic bowl.

“Are you sure that’s- I don’t know, safe? Sanitary?”

Betty ignored him, running her fingers along a femur’s length. “That’s all there is to us. Just skin stretched over this.”

“That’s not true,” Jughead said, pulling her away. “There’s a lot more to everybody and you know it. What happened to these people, it stripped away that stuff so we can’t see it now, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.”

Betty didn’t feel like there was much of anything to her anymore, and even less left of the people who died down here. She nodded to the crates behind them. “We should see what’s in there. Maybe it’ll give us some answers. More than these poor people can provide, anyway.”

“After you,” Jughead replied, waving her ahead of him, bathing her and the crates in the unpleasant gaze of the flashlight.

Betty approached the crates slowly, delicately. She didn’t press her feet hard against the ground, but still she left footprints in the dirt floor and that bothered her for some reason.

Jughead followed close behind her, skimming the flashlight over the crates, settling on one that was already open. Betty looked inside. The crate was full of rifles, familiar in their shape, size, and color. They were SoDale Specials, run off just for the Sweetwater Engagement, she’d been told. Betty ran her fingers along the barrel. It wasn’t so different from the dead person’s femur. Just as cold, lifeless, and inert.

Jughead ran the light along the edges of the crate, coming to a stop on the far side of it, rapping his knuckles against the boards. “There you go. There’s our proof. They didn’t even bother to hide it. They must have been selling through a triple agent or something.”

“What is it?” Betty asked, pulling herself away from the cold metal weapon only reluctantly.

“They have ‘Made In Riverdale’ stamped right here on the box. Guns made in SoDale were supplying the fighters in Greendale. We were equipping our enemies so they could fight us.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” said Betty, dizzy with the bitter absurdity of it. “The only reason you’d do that is if you wanted people to just die. To die en masse, and to suffer.” She stopped, thinking of South Side Academy. “If you wanted to infuse a place with death until it was permanently scarred.”

“If you wanted to carve a crest of blood,” Jughead suggested. “This was all part of the Gargoyle King’s plan. Make the bridge and the riverbank part of His transmutation circle, traumatize all of us for His appetites.”

“You know what the funny thing is?” said Betty, only half listening, looking at the rifle again. “I used to be really good with those. Never missed a shot, even when I didn’t know who I was firing at. And now?” She lifted her one hand before her and splayed the fingers. “Now I couldn’t use one of those if I tried. I couldn’t brace it without help or a prosthetic. And I’m not sad about it. That’s what’s funny. I’m never going to miss being able to do that.”

“Betty,” said Jughead, wrapping an arm around her shoulders, “Let’s get out of here. There’s nothing more we can do.”

“Not here. But there’s lots we still have to do,” she replied. “Starting with burying the person in that trashcan.”

“Do you think they have some shovels down here?” Jughead asked, and Betty pointed past him to a tangle of tools leaning against the wall, several of which were shovels. “Well, that’s convenient.” Jughead stepped forward to take one and stumbled, his left foot catching on yet another thing that gave out a metallic ringing. “Come on!”

Betty knelt to examine the item, Jughead thoughtfully turning the flashlight on it for her. It was a metal canister, open at both ends, and emblazoned with the interlocked R and D of Riverdale Research & Development, the military innovation lab. “I think we can guess how they all died,” she said, glancing over to the full cots across the room. “This looks like a gas canister.”

“Who do you think opened it?” asked Jughead, offering her the flashlight while he gathered up the shovels.

Betty stood, holding the light on the tools for him, but still looking down at the canister. “Probably the same person who brought them the guns. Someone they trusted.” A thought occurred, an idea of the perfect person to dispense this kind of betrayal. “Probably one of the homunculi, since they wouldn’t die when everyone else did.”

“That makes too much sense,” said Jughead, crossing to the ladder and tapping the metal with a shovel blade. Betty followed him and watched Kevin and Veronica’s faces appear in silhouette against the grey sky above.

“Find anything good?” Veronica asked.

“Sweetwater was an inside job,” Betty called up to her.

“And we found some shovels,” Jughead added, handing one and then another up to Kevin and Veronica, three in total.

“Fun!” Kevin said, his voice strained to a piercing crack.

“Up you go, Betty,” said Jughead, stepping back from the ladder. Betty grabbed one of the upper rungs, sliding her feet into two of the lower ones and hoisted herself up, Jughead’s hand pressed to the small of her back, not helping directly but supporting her nonetheless.

Up top, Veronica and Kevin helped her and Jughead over the lip of the crater, taking up the shovels and leaving Betty and Jughead to carry the trashcan behind them, out of the crater field and to the edge of the woods. These woods weren’t like Fox Forest or any other green space of Riverdale. They looked worn, not so much verdant as virtually dead. Yet Betty saw a few new leaves on each trees, and two or three soared upwards with no sign of impending collapse. At the foot of one of these great trees they began to dig. Betty wished she could help, but she couldn’t find a grip on a shovel that let her make much of a dent in the hard, dry earth. Instead she took her keys and began scratching at the bark of the tree above the grave. The tree was tougher than it looked and still bled thick, sticky sap when she finally pressed through its outer shell. That made Betty glad, knowing something here was still alive and kicking.

When her friends were finished with the hole, Kevin and Jughead lowered the trashcan into it. They stood around the pit, staring down at the rusted grey shape, knowing and not wanting to accept its contents.

Betty finally spoke up. “I’ll say something.”

“Please do,” Veronica prompted her.

Betty swallowed and tried to gather up all her tortured and twisted up thoughts from the day. “The first thing is that we’re sorry. That doesn’t mean much, but we have to get it out of the way so we can move onto things that really matter. So we’re sorry.” She spoke downward, into the hole and at the trashcan. “More importantly, we’re repentant. We are Riverdale and we are responsible for everything Riverdale does. We perpetrated this, and we are responsible for all the suffering that happened here.”

“We are responsible,” Kevin echoed softly. “Our fault.”

“And when you’re responsible for something, you have to take action. You have to make the change. That’s the first thing I learned as a reporter. So we’re going to make the change, and we’re not going to let anything stop us. It’s the very least that we owe to everyone here, alive and dead.” She looked at her friends, their broken hearts no longer hidden or even veiled. It hurt to see and it hurt to be one of them. She could feel them all seeing her wounds too. It was hard not to cry. Instead she said “Thank you,” first to her friends, and then to the person in the trashcan. After that, she let herself begin to cry, tears spilling down into the grave and splattering against the metal can.

They refilled the hole quickly, no one speaking, and left, still without a word. Only the little mound of earth remained. That and a single unadorned X, cut into the tree bark above, glittering with sap like white blood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: Archie and Greed have a showdown at the center of the mind for control of their shared body. Only one will emerge victorious!
> 
> Check back 10/25/19 for the update (though I'll aim for sooner)


	12. Archie's Next To Last Stand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After stopping Greed's attempt on Toni's life, Archie prepares himself to face Greed in a battle at the center of the mind. But certain memories still haunt Archie. Where will he place his faith if he no longer trusts the Lodges? Will he ever live up to his father's memory?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did make myself cry writing this chapter, I won't lie. I let this sad face run my life, Arch.

            Deep in the recesses of his mind, Archie sat on a cloud, legs folded beneath him, and waited for the inevitable. Archie had been sitting in this same spot since the night he ruined Greed’s attack on the Serpents’ prison break. Taking control of their body by force, fighting back, it had been a very brief whirlwind, but a glorious one. Now he was back in the pilot’s seat, expecting the end every minute.

            If that was possible. Could he die when he was already a ghost in his own body? Could Greed snuff him out and take the whole thing for himself, puppeteering Archie’s body around until it broke down? Probably. Archie decided if that happened, he might not mind so much. Maybe he would see his dad again.

            A particular day, a long time ago, blossomed out of Archie’s memory, spilling across the cloudbank before him. It was like a drive-in movie, flickering soft greyscale. He and his father, sitting together on the back porch. They let the low summer evening sun wash over them. They needed to forget the day. It was a bad time in Riverdale, mass arrests swallowing up someone in almost every family, Jughead’s mom among them. Archie didn’t understand why the Red Circle would take her away, leaving Jughead and Jellybean alone with someone who couldn’t take care of them. Looking back on it from the privileged vantage point of now, Archie saw himself for the child he was. So, so naïve.

            “Why do they do that, Dad?”

            “Do what, son?” Fred smiled down at his son, but his smile was crooked and heartbroken, cutting against the lines of his face, not with them.

            Once he started putting his questions into words, Archie discovered he had an almost limitless supply. “Why do they take people away like that? The Red Circle? Is it okay? You work for the military too, so does that mean you think they did the right thing?”

            “No.” Fred’s answer was quick. “You don’t have to always agree with what other people to work with them. And sometimes you can make people believe you’re working with them when you’re really working against them.”

            “Is that what you’re doing?” Archie asked, struggling to hold the thought still as it wriggled away from him. He never thought of his father as against anything. Fred Andrews was for family, friendship, loyalty. He was the positive, not the negative.

            “Working against the military? I wouldn’t say that either.” Fred stared out across the backyard, and Archie thought he might be seeing something else in his mind’s eye. “I’m working against cruelty, against the people in our government who want to do evil things.”

            “How do you know what things are evil?”

            “How do you know, son? How do you know it’s wrong that they took all those people away?”

            Archie chewed on the question, and the answer he found wasn’t in the form of words, it was the terrible look on Jughead’s face when they’d last met. It was the pause before Jughead managed to say “They took my mom away” out loud. He couldn’t finish the sentence. He’d started to cry, so broken that he let Archie crush him in a hug.

            “I guess I know that it’s wrong because of how much it hurt Jughead. You can’t be doing right if you’re hurting people that bad.” As he spoke, Archie felt his dad’s hand on his shoulder, the weight and pressure reassuring him that he was thinking the way he should, that he was making his dad proud.

            Fred nodded. “That’s the best place to start. Do whatever you can to help the most people you can. And when that isn’t clear, trust your gut.”

            Archie frowned. The signals from his gut were always confusing. One moment they said all that mattered was being quarterback of the JV football team, the next they said that music was the only thing he’d ever want to do in his life. One moment they said he was in love with Veronica, the next that he needed to like Betty back or she’d be sad. “What if I make a mistake? What if I can’t trust my gut?”

            Fred looked at him seriously, brow knit and mouth tight with concern. “If you ever get confused, Archie, trust your friends. And always, always, always remember: it’s never too late to try again. As long as you’re alive, you’ll be able to fix your mistakes.”

            “Am I interrupting?”

            The memory shredded apart, leaving Archie face-to-face with Greed. Greed floated in the grey haze, still wearing Archie’s face. But the malice and anger visible there were supremely un-Arch-like.

            “No, you showed up at the perfect time.” Archie stood, pushing himself to his feet, standing toe-to-toe with Greed, the two of them only a few meters apart. “I can’t believe I ever bought into your lies. Or Mr. Lodge’s. I can’t believe I bought into the Red Circle. I knew they did bad things, I always knew, but I let myself get worn down, worn down by Mr. Lodge, by losing my dad, losing my friends, getting attacked by that bear. All of that pushed me off the path. And into your grip.”

            Greed rolled his eyes, picking at his fingernails, gnawing on a torn cuticle. “Oh, I’m so glad you could finally rationalize your idiotic mistakes to yourself.”

            “That’s not it either, Greed. I made those mistakes. I wandered away from the right path, I hurt Veronica, Betty, Jughead, and countless other people. That’s on me.” Greed stared blankly back at him, and Archie laughed at the dull, slack-jawed expression on his own face. Was that how people saw him? It was time to prove he was deeper than that. “I guess someone like you wouldn’t understand, Greed. I finally realized I can’t have it all unless I change.”

            “Well, you have to admit, that does run a little counter to my messaging.” Greed shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter, though. You’re more trouble than you’re worth at this point. I wanted to work together, help you achieve your goals, but instead you’re just getting in the way of mine.”

            “You mean because I stopped you from killing Toni and Jellybean?” Archie thought of their terrified faces, staring up at him as Greed tormented them. He felt it with his own hands when Greed tore all those Serpents to pieces. “That was the first truly good thing I’ve done since my dad died. It’s not gonna be the last.”

            “I beg to differ.” Greed shot forward, pushing off from nothing to slam into Archie, sending him reeling backwards, tearing through clouds of thought and memory. They fell together into the abyss, speeding down in emptiness. Greed wrapped his fingers around Archie’s throat and began to squeeze. Archie shoved and slapped and strained, fighting against the ever-tightening hold, the crushing horror, but it was no use. Greed was so much stronger than he was, even here in his own mind.

            Archie met his own eyes, glaring and hate-twisted, and wondered what this fight looked like to people outside their body. Was their body just standing in the hallway, staring at nothing? Was he throttling himself, the competing impulses turning the body against itself? Maybe their body was asleep, and would wake up thinking this was all a dream, that it had always been happily united under one mind and one vision.

            Archie began to feel light-headed. Spots blossomed across his vision. His limbs grew numb and tingly. He wasn’t making any impact on Greed either, no matter how hard he hit. The monstrous Other Archie squeezed and squeezed and squeezed without remorse or relenting.

            _What if I did die here?_

            Archie allowed the thought to percolate as he gasped for air, his throat raw, dry, and crushed shut by Greed. What would happen if he died here? No one would know. No one would notice. His body would become Greed’s forever, a tool of Mr. Lodge and his master.

            Archie had only seen the Gargoyle King once since joining with Greed, but even in his death throes the memory chilled him like plunging into a frozen lake. He and Mr. Lodge went together down into the tunnels beneath Riverdale, following the endless twists and turns until they came upon the two great doors. Archie saw his friends’ faces carved into its surface, their bodies being torn apart by monsters, their eyes popping out in agony. His own face was conspicuously absent. He was safe.

            He wasn’t safe, he was about to die.

Though it really did seem as though Greed had been squeezing for a long, long time without closing the deal. The seconds ticked by and, as much as Archie suffered, he didn’t dissolve or disappear or fade into the grey clouds of memory. He was still here, still alive. Just a voice, just a ghost in the machine of his mind, but still alive.

            Instead of attacking Greed, Archie decided to try something else, something he hadn’t done in a long time. He stopped lashing out and focused all his strength inward. He imagined himself free of Greed’s grasp, falling backward into the clouds. He imagined himself lovingly embraced by the eddies of thought and memory around him. He was not an interloper here. He was not a prisoner here. That was the fatal mistake he kept making. The more he clung to anger, to sadness, to self-loathing, the less his mind was his own. It was time to turn all his pain into something useful.

            Yet another memory came, so cruel, spiked with so much hurt that Archie wondered if Greed were behind it.

            Archie knelt on the floor at Pop’s, his dad in his arms and the Black Hood standing over them. His dad was bleeding everywhere, the floor slick and dark with the ever-widening puddle beneath them. The Black Hood spoke, his mask rippling with every word. “Colonel Fred Andrews, you have failed this city. Worse, you have failed your masters. For a sin of that magnitude, the only fit punishment is death.”

            Panic spinning his mind like a top, Archie almost laughed at the Black Hood’s absurd turns of phrase, the ridiculous self-seriousness of it all. He didn’t even have a real balaclava; it was a hoodie with eye and mouth holes cut into it. The holes were frayed at the edges, ugly tears just getting uglier as the threads came more and more loose with every movement.

            “Son.” The words were blood-choked and quiet, hard to hear over Archie’s own ragged, heaving breaths. Fred tugged on his son’s jacket, and Archie looked down at his father, whose eyes were already filming over. The light was going out in Fred’s face, and Archie barely suppressed a scream.

            “Son.”

            The Black Hood turned and walked away, his work done. The bell on Pop’s door tinkled its merry song. The sound drove daggers into Archie’s heart.

            “Son.”

            “I’m here, Dad,” said Archie, forcing himself to stay with his father in the present, and not think of the decades he’d spend without his father, a vast tract of heartbroken time that would begin any second now

            “Son, listen to me,” Fred whispered, reaching up to take Archie’s face in his hand. “You can’t let this ruin your life. You have to go on.” He paused, a deep gurgle of blood roiling out of his lungs.

            “It’s okay, Dad. Catch your breath.” Archie held his father closer, feeling the blood spreading through his shirt, hot against his skin.

            “Arch.” Another choked breath. “Arch. I fought and I lost. But just this round. Don’t give up, Arch. You’re my next round. You’re the light I’m sending into the future.”

            “Dad, Dad, Dad, don’t! Dad, you don’t need another round, you’re going to be fine!” Archie had never lied so baldly to his father before, never made up something blatantly false. His father was going to die, right here and right now, and the horror of it burned through him like a hot poker through the chest.

            “Arch…” Fred fell silent for so long Archie wondered if it was over. His father’s chest rose and fell faintly until Fred sucked in a deep breath, twitching at the shock and pain. “You’re going to be fine, son. You’ve got to be fine, son.” He met Archie’s eyes, his face so much calmer and more relaxed than Archie had ever seen it before. “You can’t let this fear run your life, Arch.”

            The light went out. Fred’s eyes were dark. His body was limp. One last breath hissed out from his lungs. He was still warm. He was still bleeding. But Archie was alone in the world, the most important person in it cut out just as cleanly as if someone had taken scissors to every one of their family pictures.

_You can’t let this fear run your life, Arch._

            Since the day his father died, Archie had been trying to live by those words. He went to war, despite his fear. He fought a bear, despite his fear. He cut off his friends, despite his fear. He threw his lot in with Greed and Mr. Lodge and the Gargoyle King, despite his fear.

            But it wasn’t despite his fear that he did all those things. That was why they all went so wrong. This whole time he had let his fear run his life completely because everything he did was in response to it, everything he did was the direct descendant of that moment in Pop’s, when he suddenly became a fatherless son.

            It was time to act outside of fear. He wouldn’t stay in its shadow any longer. He couldn’t bear it.

            Archie imagined himself as something incorporeal, no longer something solid. No longer something Greed could close his hands around. And just like that he slipped through Greed’s fingers like a ghost. He smiled at the bewildered expression on his own mirrored face.

            “I don’t think you can kill me here, Greed. This is my mind and my body. And that’s what we call a home field advantage.”

            Greed lashed out, clawing at Archie. His fingers passed right through Archie’s chest and caught on nothing at all.

            Archie hovered above Greed, shaking his head and struggling not to laugh. “You’re not so tough, Greed. Not as tough as you think you are, at least. You’re more scared than I am, I bet.”

            “Shut up, Archie! I’m not scared of anything! You’re still scared of failing the SATs!” Greed hissed up at him, teeth bared.

            “The SATs.” Archie did laugh then. “We’re so far beyond the SATs at this point, I don’t think I could be bothered to sit for them. I’ve got more important things to do.”

            Taking a deep breath, Archie imagined himself five times his current size, and immediately grew, towering over the hissing, spitting Greed far below. “You’ve been wearing my face all this time, but you’re only the worst of me, Greed. And nobody wants to spend time with that guy.” Lifting one tree trunk thick leg, Archie dropped his massive foot on Greed. He ground his heel into the little body, just to drive the point home.

            Stepping back, Archie let himself return to normal size, shrinking back down until he stood over Greed’s flattened form.

            “I’ll gut you for this,” Greed raged through a broken jaw, muffled by injury and gagged by pain.

            “When you’re feeling better, maybe. But for now, I’ll be taking what’s mine.” Archie let his consciousness spread, flowing down to the ends of every nerve in his body. Everything felt strange, stretched out like clothes that someone else had borrowed.

            There was also the matter of his new power, the diamond-hard skin that could spread over his body at a moment’s notice. And the endless healing factor. And the superhuman agility. All of that would require some adjustment on his part.

            But for now just having his whole body running at his beck and call was superhuman enough. Euphoria lifted Archie until he stood on his tiptoes. He delighted in the feeling, the constant adjustments he made everywhere on his body to remain balanced. It was all under his control.

            Archie realized he had no idea where he was, or what he was supposed to be doing. He looked around, and decided he must be in an empty part of Pembrooke House. The decorations were certainly ostentatious enough, and the carpet was several inches thick. Everything was quiet and dusty, but an elevator door beckoned to him from the end of the hall. Somewhere beneath his feet he heard the hum of activity, the buzzing engines of evil that made Riverdale go round.

            He was in the belly of the beast. The very heart of the enemy. His own heart until very recently. This could be useful.

            Archie rolled his shoulders back with a satisfying pop. He was back on the side of the angels, but playing Greed for a while didn’t sound like a terrible idea. It might take some time to sneak out from under the eyes of the Lodges, not to mention rebuild any kind of trust with Jughead, Betty, or Veronica.

            Somewhere deep in the back of his brain, Archie heard Greed screaming and raging, threatening him and all his friends. But Archie found he didn’t mind. As long as Archie was in the driver’s seat, Greed could say whatever he wanted. It wouldn’t change a thing.

            Lighter than he’d been in years, lighter than he’d ever been, even before his father died, Archie set off down the hall, practicing his Greed voice and imagining the look on Mr. Lodge’s face when he saw Archie leading the charge against him.

            Now that would be a day to remember.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: Veronica and Betty discuss where they're at after the events of the last few chapters, and they renew their friendship in the face of overwhelming obstacles.
> 
> Look for the new update by 11/15/2019.

**Author's Note:**

> I welcome all responses because I desire to reap the wages of my sin.


End file.
